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on 19/1/04 11:04 AM, Alun Greenhouse at [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > The BEST option is to include a brief message that the purchaser does > not have the right to distribute the document. Easy. Cheap. Keeps honest > people honest - which is all you are going to ever achieve with > expensive protection software - and involves a minimum of pain for the > purchaser. I have just gone through this thought process myself or an eMag idea we are developing. We looked hard at FileOpen and found we could make it do all the stuff we wanted and that we could combine it with Acrobat security to be 99.9% effective for all the DRM we wanted. However, at the end of the day we imagined the restrictions on the customers were going to hurt us more than any piracy. I don't say this is always the case, (or that we are right ! ;-) It's a problematic argument because you never know; a) If you release the mag protected and get say 5,000 subscribers, how many more were turned off by the DRM ? Were there even any ? b) If you release the mag unprotected and get 5,000 subscribers, how may are reading for free ? It's completely unquantifiable either way. At the end of the day we decided to use the carrot more so than the stick. The mag will be unprotected, there are incentives and prizes for subscribers, there is a web site with discussions and other goodies for logged in subscribers only, which I know can be hacked without too much difficulty ... the few dollars for subscribing will hopefully be worth more to them to get the 'extras' than stealing it. We want to build a strong sense of community with the mag that encourages folks to 'want' to part with few bucks. Combined with the 'beneficial' pirating aspect of super-distribution we hope that on balance any unofficial distribution will do us good in the long term. Note the extensive use of words such as 'hope,imagined & unquantifiable';-) In a very unusual move for me, I am trusting in Bill Gates point of view ! as seen in the attached sig. regards dean laffan r e a l w o r l d p r o d u c t i o n s 6 7 l i t t l e g e o r g e s t, f i t z r o y m e l b o u r n e, a u s t r a l i a 3 0 6 5 home/office +613-9419-3966 Mobile 0418-525-315 -- Although about three million computers get sold every year in China, people don�t pay for the software. Someday they will, though. And as long as they�re going to steal it, we want them to steal ours. They�ll get sort of addicted, and then we�ll somehow figure out how to collect sometime in the next decade. - Bill Gates To change your subscription: http://www.pdfzone.com/discussions/lists-pdf.html
