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Comment by jemmons | Hacker News Reader

Not even remotely true. Steve Jobs himself screamed bloody murder in his open letter speaking out against DRM and the music labels didn't even budge.

Economic factors are the only indicators most copyright holders care about when it comes to DRM. The moment they can sell more copies without DRM than with, they'll drop DRM. And not a moment before.

Also note this nonsense is very acceptable to the majority of consumers, myself included. If you want to vote with your wallet and not buy the Kindle/iPhone/Zune until it drops DRM, more power to you. But you'll have to wait until those of us who are happy with the current arrangement have bought our fill and Amazon/Apple/Microsoft have to start looking for niche markets. Your complaining in the mean time is not likely to make an impact.

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Amazon is -- like most companies do, as it is hard to quantify -- ignoring the opportunity cost of including DRM.

I and I am sure hundreds of thousands if not millions more like me would already have a Kindle were it not for the DRM.

Could you please cite sources for those numbers? Given that it's unlikely you could find millions of people who even know what DRM is, I find your claim... inventive.

It seems unlikely that a corporation with so much to gain would not have done the numbers and research here. I understand you think those with your point of view are legion, but the mere fact that a large business is successfully pursuing a strategy counter your beliefs itself argues against this notion.

It is unlikely, actually -- they were forced into DRM by the publishers, not because of any true desire to include it. DRM doesn't help Amazon; it hurts them.

As for DRM, if you think that at least 200,000 people haven't heard of DRM (all my statement requires, if you'll read closely) ok then.

Do your own research, if you want to. There are resources available. The EFF alone has around 80,000 members, I believe, and I am sure just about every one of them knows what DRM is.

The problem with measuring opportunity cost is that it is very, very, very hard to measure. DRM means that I haven't bought about $500 worth of books or so, so far, I'd guess.

Wonder how many people there are like me? More than a few, even without having hard numbers, I'd wager.

If you weren't prepared to back up your statement of millions, maybe you shouldn't have said "millions"? It makes it sound as if you're tying to inflate the importance of your argument hoping you wouldn't get called on it.

I agree completely that opportunity cost is very, very, very hard to measure. Which is why I'm more likely to believe someone with resources, incentive, and skin in the game rather than anecdotal armchair talk.

I wasn't trying to inflate the importance of my argument. I was offering a guess of a possible range, given that there aren't any statistics. That's a common thing to do, and I would do it again.

If I had to guess, I'd probably say about 5% of the US population in toto has heard of DRM and could define it to a reasonable approximation. (That's about 15 million people.)

You chose to take the higher number in my range for me to "prove." I called you on it.

There are about 5.8 million people in the tech industry in the US. I've worked in some pretty big tech shops (and some small ones) in the US. Almost everyone I've worked with has heard of DRM, no matter what they think of it.

But assuming even only 10% of them have heard of DRM (an extremely low estimate) that'd be 580,000 people right there.

That's not proof, as there can't be any such thing in this case.

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