Yeah, me!
A post on Stephen's blog points to ReadWriteWeb's summary of the results of a 2011 survey showing why people in the UK pirate ebooks.
Know what? I pirated two ebooks yesterday. My wife purchased two titles from the B&N Nook store, and after we collectively spent nearly two hours attempting to get them to transfer to her Sony PRS-350 ereader I gave up and grabbed them via bittorrent, and had them installed in a matter of minutes. That included finding, downloading, and then moving over to the ereader. I even did a fair amount of research trying to get Calibre plugins to help me strip the DRM, and was unsuccessful there before I went rogue.
What's that saying about DRM? Damn, I can't find the one about how DRM only works against law-abiding citizens, but I did find this one that says the same thing: Every time DRM prevents legitimate playback, a pirate gets his wings.
Stupid DRM. Wasted my time, didn't accomplish what it was supposed to.
Comments
One response to “Survey Finds E-Book Piracy Occurs Among a Surprising Demographic”
I’d say that quote is more directly addressing what happened to you: that out-of-control DRM turns law-abiding citizens directly into pirates. Not that I would say that downloading unencumbered copies of something you legitimately purchased is really piracy, but now you have an operational familiarity with the mechanisms of piracy (and with how much more convenient it is than attempting to work inside the system) that you never would have needed to develop in the absence of excessive restrictions.
So basically, DRM is the gateway drug to piracy.