Tue, 31 Dec 2002
DRM on ...
According to
this report,
the DRM system for Microsoft Reader e-text files has been cracked. So
authors putting their trust in locks to keep readers from copying
their work are going to be disappointed again -- as opposed to those
authors who
put their trust in readers.
As Tim O'Reilly points out,
piracy is progressive taxation
in another guise; authors and artists have more reason to be afraid of
obscurity than piracy. Using DRM tools to lock your work up so that it
can only be read by people who paid for it, using one specific computer,
increases obscurity and decreases the chance that new readers will be
exposed to the work -- readers who might buy later works as a direct
result of enjoying the free taste. So I'm going to give my qualified
applause to this crack -- and hope that Microsoft have more sense than
to go after the authors the way that Adobe went after Dmitri Sklyarov
and Elcomsoft.
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