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Comment by cstross | Hacker News Reader

I believe those of the Big Five publishers who are committed to DRM -- other than Macmillan, where DRM is already very optional indeed (the decision is made on a per-book basis, with some imprints being entirely DRM-free) -- are already revisiting the question of whether DRM buys them anything useful.

This may well be a small nail in the coffin, going forward. They may be slow to change, but they're already clear on the point that the main driver for ebook piracy is scarcity and inconvenience to the customer rather than malice: this is hardly going to help sell them on DRM (especially as Adobe are bound to be charging on the supply side -- demanding fees for new software and encryption keys and requiring publishers to re-encrypt their entire backlist).

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The Big Five publishers should be long past "Does DRM buy us anything useful?" and should be thinking about "Is DRM hurting our interests?"

The effect of DRM on piracy is negligible at best and could be actively promoting it at worst (when ordinary customers get stuck in these hoops). Meanwhile, the main practical impact of ebook DRM is to create lock-in for ebook DRM providers, especially the ones that are also retailers, like Amazon.

The Big Five publishers seem convinced that Amazon is a serious threat to their business. Given that, I don't understand why they give Amazon the club to beat them with by insisting on the customer-hostile misfeature of DRM. If they hadn't done that in the first place, perhaps they wouldn't have felt forced to solve their "Amazon problem" with an illegal conspiracy in the second place.

+1 to this. I guess the question is whether these stodgy old publishing houses can adapt to thinking about how they can be more forward-looking than Amazon, rather than continuing to try to protect the paper model. I hope they do, because as much as I like the convenience of Amazon's products and services, the lack of interoperability is a big turnoff.

Funny how it took the music industry a long time to come to that conclusion (that DRM is useless), but every other industry insists on making the same mistakes again.

Kinda like parents and children, I suppose.

probably shareholder lobbying.

1. invest in useless DRM vendor.

2. buys share of company X, go to meetings and say how by not using DRM shareholders are getting screwed.

3. shareholders demand DRM

4. profit!

...If this does not exist yet, I demand 10% commission.

Videogames dealt with piracy and DRM way before music, movies and books, and DRM is very much alive there. The only significant change in DRM usage in videogames is due to the shift to service-oriented games (multiplayer, updates, events, etc).

One of the differences with video game piracy (at least a few years ago) is that video games tend to have a short window after release when they make most of their sales. Everyone in the industry knows that a game will be pirated eventually so DRM is seen a way of delaying the availability of pirated version of games to maximize that window of sales.

Obviously, this varies with publisher, studio, and game, but that was the rationale I heard when I worked in the industry.

What's worse is that Hollywood and Netflix are now trying to push DRM to the web.

It's interesting, though I can't say how significant, that the (pretty tiny) tabletop-RPG publishing industry, which went electronic in a serious way much earlier than publishing in general, largely abandoned DRM at a very early stage in the process.

Two words: "fewer lawsuits".

RPG companies, with a couple of exceptions (ahem: Wizards of the Coast, Hasbro, Games Workshop), are tiny. Which means there's a single desk labelled "the buck stops here".

Whereas at a big corporation with billion dollar revenues at stake, nobody wants to make a decision that triggers a shareholder lawsuit -- especially if it's one that's devilishly hard to prove either way. (If you've got DRM on ebooks, then remove it, activist shareholders can in principle try to sue you either for losing revenue to piracy by dropping DRM, or for having lost revenue in the past due to embracing DRM. So it's much safer not to do anything at all ...)

It is no accident that the first of the Big Five English-language conglomerates to break step on DRM was Macmillan. Macmillan is the English-language subsidiary of Holtzbrinck, which is privately owned.

> (ahem: Wizards of the Coast, Hasbro, Games Workshop)

Hasbro owns Wizards of the Coast now, btw. Abandon hope all ye etc.

Avalon Hill too, of course (or what's left of it).

Even GW is selling DRM-free epub now.

Shareholder lawsuits are vanishingly rare, though.

> which went electronic in a serious way much earlier than publishing in general, largely abandoned DRM at a very early stage in the process.

IIRC, most of the early adopters -- who did their own PDF distribution -- in the RPG industry never used DRM at all, the very little adoption DRM ever had was among second-wave electronic companies that were using third-party PDF distribution services that offered DRM as an option (IIRC, the default option, in some cases.)

This matches my experience--a friend and I were among those "early adopters" who published PDFs back in the D&D 3.0 days, and nobody was using DRM then; first, nobody wanted to pay the license fees to Adobe or whomever (most of us couldn't afford them in any case), and second, all it would have done was piss off our customers anyway. Later on (in the D&D 3.5 days), as you say, third-party PDF distribution services started offering DRM, but even then there wasn't a lot of uptake that I could see.

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