Comment by quoderat | Hacker News Reader

Comment by quoderat | Hacker News Reader

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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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