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Comment by aaronem | Hacker News Reader

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aaronem

Yes. Because heaven forfend anyone should get paid. One cannot serve both God and Mammon.

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Right. Because without DRM, people don't get paid?

Your argument (here) is not better than the STD comparison: Apples, oranges, no relevant content.

Isn't most of the (digital!) music market DRM free by now? How does that EVEN WORK?

Actually, DRM systems prevent me from seeing content I'm willing to purchase. I tried to buy the Dragon Book on Kindle some time ago, but I couldn't because I live in Australia.

What was that about getting paid again?

Or any active content! Why would Amazon sell apps in only North America?!

It's called geoblocking. The Australian Senate held hearings into it. Fun fact: I was looking to buy Cowboy Bebop and Star Trek: The Next Generation on iTunes. Not available, but definitely available in the U.S. App Store.

Even before streaming, the media publishing industries have been into segmenting the world into different markets for the same product: For example: books separately published in the US and the UK, DVDs and Blu-Ray disks with region codes that prevent playing on the other region players (providing they're players which obey this flag.)

Time to disrupt these arseholes.

But unlike most other media there's no other way to purchase them. I can't buy DVDs of Kindle active content, I can't get it off ebay.

I guess they mustn't consider the international market worth the trouble of solving whatever legal issue is stopping them from selling them to other countries.

My publisher pays me and all their other authors and uses no DRM on e-books. They sell more e-book because it isn't a hassle to move them around. They are a big enough publisher that if their sales and revenue significantly diverged from industry norms they would rethink that policy. On the other hand, I don't know of anyone going out of business for lack of DRM.

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