[nyreed]

I mean, honestly this was clear from the moment online stores with DRM'd media started appearing. If it's not stored on your own device in a DRM free format, it can disappear at any time.

It's less 'the dark side of DRM', and more simply that DRM requires actively maintained infrastructure. When the business case isn't there to pay for that anymore (or the company goes bust), then what else can one expect?

[inlined]

Engineering has the concept of “fail safe”. It literally means that the failure mode is a safe mode. If the dns of the DRM server can no longer be reached, a fail safe would allow the book to continue to be read.

[cheerlessbog]

Wouldn't it be easy to fool such a check?

[hyperman1]

Most DRM is trivially easy to fool: Just pirate. When you circumvent DRM, you are pirating, except you paid for the privilege. You probably also have a bigger risk of being caught, as you still run the DRM software.

[guitarbill]

well, you're still supporting the people behind the works, which - believe it or not - i like to do.

and also, while the iso/tv/movie scene has strict quality rules, the ebook "scene" seems more ad-hoc. pirated ebooks are sometimes OCR scans with tonnes of spelling mistakes or weird formatting, or ancient editions.

in short, de-DRM can still be preferable.

[inlined]

Also, there are other ways to implement copy protection. Eg Apple moved from DRM to fingerprinting downloads so torrented music could be traced to the leaker.

[cthaeh]

Your clearly not looking in the right places. You can find good quality, recent edition copies of any relatively popular book online now.

[anoncake]

If you want to support the people behind the works, send them money. That way you also bypass any middlemen you don't care about.

[hyperman1]

You're also sending the message that DRM is OK. So I personally prefer to just buy the DRMless or else paper version.

[inlined]

There could be other solutions that are harder to fake. E.g. a failsafe that an SSL pinned address returns 410 GONE. That’s stupidly cheap to run indefinitely.