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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Krensky" data-source="post: 4757969" data-attributes="member: 30936">They had it. DRM does not work. It never has. It has always been trivial to overcome for those who wanted to, and always been annoying, aggravating, and damaging to the consumer. There is nothing to suggest that this trend will change in the future. I would further suggest that no DRM system will ever be secure enough to stop or even meaningfully slow piracy. The watermarking system allows consumers to do what they want and expect with a file, and allows producers to find out who to sue or cut off if it is illegally shared. Ebooks are a non-issue for retail. retail stores piss and moan over it, but what's killing them are their typical lack of professionalism, poor buisness practices, and online retailers, not pdfs. If Wizards wanted to drive more dead tree sales to game stores, they should stop selling to Amazon or insist that Amazon sell at MSRP. Either that or get into the idiotic model of consignment used by most publishing houses and book stores.The most successful (afaik) ebook publisher doesn't use DRM at all and has repeatedly said that doing so is a waste of time, money, and hurts your business by showing that you view your customers as potential criminals and spending money on DRM that could be spent getting new content or reprinting back catalog. You can find this company's ebooks on torrent sites and the like, but the torrents tend to be rather sickly because the market for their books considers the prices and freedom the publisher provides good value, so rather then hunting for a torrent or ftp site or whatever they go to the company's store, fork over $6 and download the novel in their choice of formats for whatever reading device they may have.Piracy primarily happens for two reasons: Economics and idealism. You solve the economics issue by giving the public what they want. Cheap ebooks with little or no DRM that can be accessed in multiple ways. PDF more or less fulfills these requirements (other then price), if only via ubiquity. You can't solve the idealism issue. Some superannuated adolescent will always find some way to pirate material because of his beliefs that "information wants to be free" (which is not what Brand said) and because it makes him feel like he's sticking t to the man or gets him props in his dysfunctional community.Most pirates fall into the first group. They're downloading pirated material because the cost is too high, the DRM is to restrictive, or some other form of artificial scarcity pushes the legal product out of the market. Most content providers or creators respond by villifying the consumer and demanding legal remedies.There is actually a second type of person who is an "idealistic" pirate. This is the issue that the RIAA and MPAA and the people they represent have run afoul of at this point. Due to abuse of the market and consumer, people have reclassified them from "creative people who deserve our money" into "crooks". Once an industry or entity moves from the former to the later, you find all sorts of people who no longer consider it wrong to pirate their work. Wizards is on the edge of this cliff. Hopefully they won't fall in.</blockquote>

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