If you use DRM, I hate you.


Preface: I don't use DRM on my books. Do what you want with it. Pirate it for all I care. If people are reading it, I'm happy.

Devices in Chains-Day Against DRM
Brendan Mruk and Matt Lee

If you use DRM, I hate you.

DRM is terrible. It needs to die in a fire and never come back. I bought something. Doesn’t that mean I own it and I can do whatever I want (barring distribution/piracy) with it?

Dammit, I just want to read the books I bought on iBooks on my Kindle Fire. THAT IS ALL I WANT.

But no. NOOO. That is not possible. Because Apple makes iBooks an Apple thing. I can only read it on my Mac products. And THEY own the distribution rights of the iBook format of the book. So fellow authors, you don’t own all the rights to your product because of a specific format. Isn’t that wonderful?

Guess what. In this day and age you aren’t buying content. You are buying a format. Be it Apple’s iBooks or DRM infested epub or Amazon’s DRM’d .mobi/.AZW format. You are chaining yourself to someone’s walled garden or ‘special’ format.

So let’s say, for instance, you wanted to read a Amazon book on a different app or in a different format. Good luck. Not gonna happen.

Not unless you, you know, use a DRM cracker, which is ILLEGAL in the United States of America, land of the free and home to the brave. You can’t convert your mobi to epub so you can switch platforms or use a different ereader.

Since when did being a consumer become more like a voluntary prison sentence? By buying something I have become shackled to that format and ecosystem. I want to take a sledgehammer to these walled gardens and see the plants of all the other gardens. No borders. No walls.

I just want to use the content I paid for. In any way I choose.

Is that too much to ask?

Readers Against DRM Logo

If you hate DRM, complain about it, don’t use it, and don’t tolerate it.



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