DRM hurts publishers as well as users.
Having won a minor battle with the Kindle, publishers are now free to request that digital reading can be disabled on any individual book that is downloaded.
That may be bad news fhe book industry.
So far the transition to digital media has been filled with different industries practicing radical nose removal, absolutely convinced that the face they are removing is not their own.
But if you take a look at the history of iTunes it turns out there is a hidden cost to DRM, and it can hurt the person that loves it most, the publisher: That’s because it locks your content to a device that you don’t own. The better that device does the more the distributor rather owns your customer. Every purchase they make locks the customer deeper into a relationship that they can’t escape, and that means they get to dictate the rules.
There’s currently a great article about this over on Slate, and it does a good job of showing the possible non-obvious consequences:
But the Kindle’s restrictions are more worrying than those associated with the iPhone, the iPod, and other gizmos. For one thing, if you objected to the iTunes Store’s policies, there was always another way to legally buy music for your iPod—you could buy CDs (from Amazon, perhaps) and rip the tracks to MP3. That’s not an option for books; there’s no easy way to turn dead trees into electrons. Moreover, books are important. As a culture, we’ve somehow determined that it’s OK for a video-game console maker to demand licensing fees and exercise complete control over the titles that get on to their systems. Sure, this restricts creativity and free expression, but if that’s the business model that keeps the game business alive, so be it.
These aren’t easy issues to deal with, especially since to accept them you need to get over the usual impulses of "obvious" and "right and wrong" arguments that people cling to.
But digital media really isn’t analogous to what’s come before, because at the end of every chain of logic is the daunting realization that owning something on a computer allows you to be a distributor as well as a customer.
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