Will Hachette Be The First Big-6 Publisher To Drop DRM On E-Books? | paidContent

“DRM is just ‘a speedbump,’ Hachette’s Maja Thomas said at a copyright conference this afternoon. However, opinion within Hachette is clearly divided. DRM ‘doesn’t stop anyone from pirating,’ Hachette SVP Thomas said in a publishing panel at Copyright Clearance Center’s OnCopyright 2012. ‘It just makes it more difficult, and anyone who wants a free copy of any of our books can go online now and get one. There’s a misconception that somehow the digital format of books has made piracy increase, or become logarithmically more serious. But piracy was always very easy to do, because scanning a physical copy of a book [takes] a matter of minutes. A physical book doesn’t have DRM on it. Coming from the audio business, where I started, we had DRM on our audiobooks when music had DRM on it, and as that changed, a lot of audio publishers started to drop the DRM on their audiobooks. We were one of the last ones to drop it... The business was not destroyed. If anything, it became more robust. You could argue that taking the DRM off e-books would be in the benefit of consumers, and possibly even publishers, because then you wouldn’t have the device lock-in you have now. We saw that with Pottermore this week, [watermarking and] moving a file onto eight different platforms easily. [More about Harry Potter DRM here, here and here.] That’s certainly revolutionary.’ However, Thomas’s view does not align with that expressed by Hachette UK CEO Tim Hely Hutchinson in a letter to authors and agents this week. He wrote: DRM (Digital Rights Management encryption, on which we insist) divides opinion. Our view is that the advantages greatly outweigh any perceived disadvantages. While DRM cannot prevent file-sharing by the most determined pirates it can and does act as a brake on the casual sharing of files and, in the overwhelming majority of cases, it works in the background without causing problems for anyone.’”