If Tor sells you one of my books for the Kindle locked with Amazon's DRM, neither I, nor Tor, can authorise you to remove that DRM. Most developed countries have signed up to the WIPO Copyright Treaty of 1996, and have implemented it in laws that make it illegal for anyone except a DRM vendor to remove DRM. But that's just the most obvious way that DRM is bad for business. If all DRM did was drive legit customers to pirate downloads, that would be bad enough for publishers. Google has scanned some 16 million books in the last few years. That is, it's very easy to retype a DRM-locked ebook, or scan a physical book, or take screenshots of a DRM-locked ebook, and convert the resulting image files to text. What's more, books are eminently re-digitisable. And since there's no legitimate market for DRM – no readers are actively shopping for books that only open under special approved circumstances – and since the pirated ebooks are more convenient and flexible than the ones that people pay for, the DRM-free pirate editions drive out the DRM-locked commercial editions. Once one user manages that, the game is up, because that clever person can either distribute ebooks that have had their DRM removed, or programs to remove DRM (or both). Like all DRM systems, ebook DRM presumes that you can distribute a program that only opens up ebooks under approved circumstances, and that none of the people you send this program to will figure out how to fix it so that it opens ebooks no matter what the circumstances.
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