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by dandelion_lover
4110 days ago
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Thank you for the presenting your opinion in details. I see your point. What I do not like in this approach is that I find it to be similar with "I have nothing to hide" argument (see also the comments below). You personally may not have any (unexpected) bad consequences because of such choice. But please look at the analogy. Giving to a three-letter agency a possibility to collect and store all private information about you, gives them an incredible power over the population as a whole, taking away the democracy from all the people. Looks like a tragedy of commons, by the way. Giving to a commercial company a possibility to own all your books, gives them a power to do whatever they want including censorship and maybe manipulating people. tl;dr: you personally may not have any side effects, but the community as a whole will. |
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I'm also trying to have some balance in ebook story. Is DRM bad? Yes. But for me it's necessary evil. My understanding is that between having vibrant ebooks/ereaders ecosystem with DRM and not having ebooks at all (or having it in some geek niche), Stallman and co would choose the niche part. I strongly disagree with that.
The whole discussion started with a comment about Stallman "being right about ebooks and DRM". I still can't see where Stallman is actually right and where is the problems. Even you talk about some possible power to enforce censorship and manipulate people. Yeah, it's possible. But there's also a possibility where that scenario doesn't happen (because Amazon have very strong financial incentive to prevent that scenario)
And about some three letter agency... You don't fight three letter agency by not buying DRM-ed books. You fight these agencies by changing the system. There's very little difference between having some ebook in the cloud and buying plain old non-DRMed dead tree book online (or even in the book store) with your credit card. You have and use credit cards, right? Or you use only paper money, in brick and mortar stores, to avoid any chance of collecting and storing private information about you?