David Pogue in the NYT:
One of my readers is alarmed by a precedent being set:
“When the iPod introduced music lovers to the idea of copy protection, a years-long war ensued between consumers and the RIAA (and others). The primary issue was that if I purchased a song for my music player, it would only play on that player; I didn’t really own it, per se. Years later, we finally have digital music without copy protection.
“Enter the Kindle and the Nook and copy-protected books. If I purchased a Kindle a year ago, and I have 30 books for it, and now want a Nook… you can guess where this is going.
“Where are the upset people? I never see reports on how e-book copy protection is bad for consumers. Didn’t we learn anything from the music industry? Does this lock-in bother you? Am I missing something?”
Society is adapting to owning nothing.
since the digital revolution, the VHS generation has lamented the loss of ownership of music, video, and books. but the digital generation knows nothing of life in the before-time and is perfectly happy to repurchase the same on-demand content over and over and over again.
copyright becomes invalid
Rather, the current generation see the fallacy of “renting” media and is more and more comfortable “stealing” media instead.
Current copyright laws lobbied for my multinational corporations seem out of touch with reasonable common sense.
The only vote that matters is how (or don’t spend) you spend your dollars.
Lack of universal file format.
The problem is not the copy protection, it is the lack of a universal file format that translates between devices. If Epub was adopted by everyone in the industry, it would be possible to transfer files between different devices.