DRM-Free Day, forever.

http://radar.oreilly.com/2012/05/drm-free-day-forever.html

by Garbage • 14 years ago

133 24 14 years ago

radar.oreilly.com

micro-ram• 14 years ago

I showed my support and bought 2 books.

ChuckMcM2• 14 years ago

Three here :-) Machine Learning, Git, and Haskell

bostonvaulter2• 14 years ago

Which Git book did you get?

m4rkuskk• 14 years ago

I got "Node up and running", "Programming Amazon EC2", and "Developing Backbone.js Applications".

slowpoke4• 14 years ago

Stopped reading at "theft". Sorry, I don't take anyone serious who equates or even compares copying to thievery. It's factually wrong, and serves as nothing but an attempt to discredit anyone critical of or even opposed to copyright (whether just in its current form or in its entirety).

lloeki2• 14 years ago

While I strongly agree with the statement that copyright infringement does not equal theft, you're overreacting. It's even more ridiculous when the article is actually on your side of the argument.

slowpoke4• 14 years ago

As I said, I literally stopped reading. This is a matter of principle for me, because it in almost all cases, this analogy either means the writer is dishonest and tries to invoke an appeal to emotion, or that they are uninformed/a victim of industry propaganda - and I really doubt the latter is the case. This might just be the exception that proves the rule.

rickmb• 14 years ago

I don't think he's overreacting. I read further, made it almost to the end, but stopped when the author kept re-iterating his "stealing" BS.

So he's against DRM. Fine. He's still repeating the same bullshit propaganda / newspeak that serves to justify draconian "anti-piracy" laws and the continuing attack on civil rights.

As slowpoke says, he continues to discredit those who are opposed to copyright in its current form (which by its very definition violates civil rights, it's just that we never really noticed until technology changed) as thieves and pirates.

The insults and accusations make it pretty obvious who's side he's on.

m_for_monkey2• 14 years ago

This article was written by a publisher, O'Reilly, and they are obviously against copying. They don't use DRM because they know that it simply doesn't work, it would be a wasted effort, and as a bonus this way they can look "free", "open" and "cool". Of course they use the words "copying" and "theft" interchangeably, they don't really know or care about the difference, they are just bullshitting.

egypturnash• 14 years ago

tl;dr: Piracy makes good promotion for tech reference books. Bing returns a lot more links than Google when you hunt for anything involving "torrent".

theon144• 14 years ago

Also: Piracy doesn't hurt sales as much as you might (like to) think, and DRM is not a good deterrent against piracy anyway.

d0mine• 14 years ago

I'd guess Bing reports less accurate numbers than Google

Teapot• 14 years ago

I'm thinking that people that cant afford, or thinks that 50$ is overpriced, are correct. Just as those paying for it are also correct. Just as those that would pay even more. Fixed prices is a tradeoff that is needless nowadays. Try a better way. ● Spread the book far a wide on torrents everywhere. Make the Book also freely downloadable from your site. ● This maximizes the number of readers. ● This maximizes the number of readers that wants more books. ● Tell them that that next book is planned, it will cost this much to write. Donate here. BitCoin, Flattr, PayPal, etc. (It's no more begging then begging for 50$ per book)

The upside is far more readers and thus far more potential payers. And variable payment makes it affordable for everyone. The cost of writing is also payed in advance, no more worries about how the book may sell.

And finally, zero piracy. =O

m_for_monkey2• 14 years ago

And no publisher or any intermediary to rip off both the author and the readers.

slowpoke4• 14 years ago

You just described Kickstarter[1]. :)

I personally like this approach because it doesn't rely on distribution as a business model anymore. By the Flying Spaghetti Monster, it's 2012 and we're still forced to pay for flipping some bits because an industry thinks it deserves to be saved from having been made obsolete through technological progress by ridiculous and increasingly draconian laws.

[1] http://www.kickstarter.com/

StavrosK• 14 years ago

Free startup idea: Something that will sell content, like http://kout.me/, but, instead of money, you ask for a (verified) email address beforehand. A configurable amount of time later (a month if it's a book, three days if it's a video, etc), you send the "buyer" an email, asking them to donate if they enjoyed the content, and make that process as easy as possible.

I know I've wanted to donate many times for things I got for free, or for books that were handed down to me, or whatever, but there doesn't currently exist a good model for this. I like the "pay what you want" model of leanpub, but I think you would get even more revenue per thing if you made it free to read and based it on the honor system.

Anyway, it sounds like an interesting experiment.

te_chris• 14 years ago

What about people who are wanting to make money off their one book? I'm not saying I disagree with you, but not every author wants to constantly be writing books, some people just write one on a topic of interest then leave it at that.

john2x• 14 years ago

A thought I had, if publishers don't want their content to be digitally copied, why do they make them digital in the first place?

Why do they get to have and eat their cake.

jk• 14 years ago

Linux Device Drivers, 3e, was available for free legitimate download - the authors themselves released GPL version of the book online - all the while. I bet it has not affected the sale of the book.

Forget piracy, we have a Safari books online account. Still, we buy copy of books we like. I have seen a lot of people doing the same.

hxa7241• 14 years ago

Thinking of piracy as a tax is not really a very good way to understand things.

Business is only able to sell copies at monopoly prices because the government gives them that ability through copyright law -- copyright is effectively a negative tax, a subsidy: the government gives businesses money the free market would not otherwise provide.

Since current copyright terms are almost certainly, in general, too large, piracy is working as a corrective: it brings actual copyright 'protection' back towards economically defensible and efficient levels.

One might feel there is still wrongness in piracy: that it is unfair, that some pay and others get things for free. But there is a very substantial amount of free-choice here: people are not at all strictly forced to pay and strictly prevented from free access. People can make a choice.

This seems like it might be, or at least suggest, a rather more functional kind of market than the standard conception. Instead of access being set bluntly and by guesswork by governmental law, it is decided by each individual according to their particular circumstances.

DRM-Free Day, forever.

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