To DRM, or not to DRM

DRM - Digital Rights Management is a hot topic at the O'Reilly Tools of Change conference in Frankfurt (#tocfrankfurt), or at least TPM is (that's technical protection measures).*


Ronald Schild, CEO of MVB, made the point that it is a tough value proposition to charge for the TPM protected version, which by definition is not as easy to use, if you have an illegal, pirated version of a book that gives the user no TPM hassles.


Also, I hear that there is competition among pirates to be the first to post an illegal copy on a bit torrent site and huge kudos among their community goes to the first person to break the TPM. That seems like an incentive to pirate TPM protected content that just isn't there for something that has no TPM. Or is that DRM?


Ian


*It's interesting to me that DRM - which strictly speaking is about managing and communicating rights digitally is often used to mean TPM, which is about stopping users doing things with your content that you don't want them to do...