Cute publicity stunt that tries to show pirates what it feels like. I have pretty mixed feelings about the whole thing but I think it is a nice little hack.
"If the major publishers switch to selling ebooks without DRM, then they can enable customers to buy books from a variety of outlets and move away from the walled garden of the Kindle store. They see DRM as a defense against piracy, but piracy is a much less immediate threat than a gigantic multinational with revenue of $48 Billion in 2011 (more than the entire global publishing industry) that has expressed its intention to "disrupt" them, and whose chief executive said recently "even well-meaning gatekeepers slow innovation" (where "innovation" is code-speak for "opportunities for me to turn a profit")."
"There’s no DRM field in the product listing, but it turns out there’s an easy way to tell: just check under product details whether the title has device usage set to unlimited. If so, there’s no DRM."
"I want to be free more than I want to be a writer."
If publishers OK it, Amazon allows books to borrowed. Here is a site that tries to allow this among groups broader than friends. Let's see how long this lasts.
I now understand the HDCP master key leak. Thanks Ed Felton!
Wait, isn't a patent on DRM which makes it less easy (or more expensive) for others to do a good thing?
``North Korea will have less complications surrounding copyright issues compared to the South, and with the government pushing the project directly, the country seems to have acquired a wealth of e-book content over a relatively short period of time,'' Kim told Yonhap News.
Answer: Seems so. People sure don't like DRM.
DRM does not seem to be hurt for streaming media and, weirdly, people don't seem to have such a big problem with this since it's more like "renting" something anyway. A nice commentary that might help us prioritize things in the anti-DRM fight going forward.
