Cracking DRM is currently an arcane skill (well, for everything except LIT, which has moved from "cracked" to "split wide open"), but I expect that to change. As people buy new ebook readers & other portable devices, they'll demand to transfer their previously-purchased books to their new reading screen--and they'll pick up cracking skills to do so.
Not everyone. But there'll be wide enough demand that the cracking programs will get simpler & more easily accessed. (And publishers will demand their removal. And ISPs will comply. And they'll pop up on other blogs, in other countries, who aren't held to the DMCA. And they'll be torrented, handed around from computer to computer with no central source, and publishers will be put in the odd position of considering whether to file multithousand dollar lawsuits on random college students for handing out 500kb of coded script.)
Doctorow made a good point when he said that "It will never, ever, EVER get any harder to copy information from here on in."
They -- the publishers, the government, whatever -- could stop "piracy" ... by destroying the useful parts of the internet. (Which would then shatter back into individual bulletin boards, only with broadband connections.) They cannot, however, end filesharing without ending what makes businesses run.
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Not everyone. But there'll be wide enough demand that the cracking programs will get simpler & more easily accessed. (And publishers will demand their removal. And ISPs will comply. And they'll pop up on other blogs, in other countries, who aren't held to the DMCA. And they'll be torrented, handed around from computer to computer with no central source, and publishers will be put in the odd position of considering whether to file multithousand dollar lawsuits on random college students for handing out 500kb of coded script.)
Doctorow made a good point when he said that "It will never, ever, EVER get any harder to copy information from here on in."
They -- the publishers, the government, whatever -- could stop "piracy" ... by destroying the useful parts of the internet. (Which would then shatter back into individual bulletin boards, only with broadband connections.) They cannot, however, end filesharing without ending what makes businesses run.