Social DRM needs to make it clear that the purchaser of a work has certain rights that others don’t. For example, the purchaser needs to be able to make copies to access the work when and where they want but, in turn, they can’t transfer this right to others. This is, in my view, the fundamental difference between copyright in the analogue world and the digital world; the purchaser needs a ‘ right to copy’ but they should not have the ‘first sale’ right to transfer all their rights to someone else with the transfer of a copy.

One of the objections raised in the comments here is that the person who’s fingerprint was initially on the work could be held responsible for sharing by others who happened to get hold of a copy. To correct this, it must be emphasized that it is the ‘act’ of copying by non purchasers that is illegal not that the purchaser failed to protect the copy. I believe that the work should not be identified with a fingerprint of the purchaser (or anything that directly identifies the purchaser) but with a contract identification that defines who are the rights holders and hence who is entitled to make copies.

If the locks were enough to keep them from stealing, and they did not resort to driving through the wall… your friend won. The trick is to figure out how much security you need, versus how popular your product is, so people who want it will stop short of throwing the truck in gear and backing it into your storefront at speed.

About the WotC issue: For that to have happened, someone had to turn in a bootlegged copy, or make a bootlegged copy available for someone to find who was interested in turning them in. It will serve to catch a pirate, assuming someone does turn them in (and assuming a pirate stoopid enough to have bootlegged copies with their own fingerprint IDs stamped into them). It does not recover the stolen goods already out there, and which can be bootlegged even further (and thereafter, point back to the original pirates only, not the most recent generation of them).

This also raises the question of someone having a copy of an e-book stolen and bootlegged: Though the purchaser was a law-abiding citizen, the thief gets away with no way to identify him, and the stolen goods are still out there.

Social DRM has too many holes in it to be effective in most cases.

My friend could have spend twice what all of his stock was worth on the fanciest, strongest lock available, but if someone was determined to steal it they could drive a truck through the wall or cut a hole in the roof, etc. Any way you can think of to defeat thieves, thieves will find a way to defeat it. By buying bigger and better locks you may win some of the battles, but you will still lose the war. You can DRM all you like but in the end those who are determined to pirate it will do so.

The purpose of locks is not to keep absolutely everyone out… but to keep most everyone out. In other words, you want more people to think it’s more trouble to break that lock than to just buy the product. If loss is mitigated by the lock, it is considered effective. If you have more loss, install a better lock. If the amount you spend on the lock is less than the acceptable profit you’re making on your product, you win.

Most people who consider doing dishonest deeds do not worry about “embarrassment” as a deterrent. In this society, they shrug, say they’re sorry, and go on with their lives… no harm, no foul.

No: They worry about concrete things like fines and jailtime, loss of income, loss of rights, and loss of property. Social DRM threatens none of these things, so I don’t see any chance of it being effective.

Ultimately, we need to keep in mind that modern digital technology makes
it almost as easy to scan a paper book onto a computer and convert it
into an ebook as it is to download an ebook.

To put it in simple terms, no DRM is going to stop the illegal file
sharers. Nor are cheap prices (people shoplift at dollar stores every
day) going to stop them.

On the flip side however, DRM and/or high prices will provide incentives
for honest people to break the law. If you treat people like criminals,
some are going to start acting like criminals. If people feel ebooks
are too expensive for what they are getting, they will turn to cheaper
sources.

So what is the solution? To a certain extent, publishers just have to
accept that a certain amount of file sharing is going to happen. They
can and should crack down on the major sites, but they have to accept
that they probably will never get all of them. Meanwhile, they should
concentrate on making sure that the 90% of people who are honest are not
given a reason to become dishonest and they should work on convincing
the next generation that there are good reasons to pay for books, music
and movies.

This can be done by making honest people completely free to deal honestly with the material: they know better than anyone what it is right and wrong to do with it. They need no threats of prosecution to make them behave – the possibility of embarrassment is the only encouragement they need.

That’s great… for the honest people. What about the dishonest ones, who knowingly (and often gleefully) share files illegally, between themselves, under the authority’s nose? Or is the idea to create a bunch of Brute Squads to randomly break down doors looking for illegal content? Because that’s what you’ll need to do to find the people who like being dishonest.

To answer the question: As a self-publisher and e-book distributor, I would not use social DRM, because selling fairly to your customers accomplishes the same thing: It minimizes theft.

Just out of curiosity, Martin, where are you from? And what’s different about the law and morals there compared to the U.S.?

I want to make sure that all theft of copyright material is deliberate. I want to make sure that everyone who makes illicit copies is doing so with evil intent.

This can be done by making honest people completely free to deal honestly with the material: they know better than anyone what it is right and wrong to do with it. They need no threats of prosecution to make them behave – the possibility of embarrassment is the only encouragement they need.

“Can we build a consensus that fingerprinting is honest and respectable, and persuade toolmakers to preserve it on file conversion and not to supply tools for removing it?”
Definately, watermarking is honest and doesn’t say: “Hi, I’m publisher and I think you, consumer, buy this eBook to make illegal copies! I don’t trust you, thief!” as it is now with regular DRM systems. You can always think you’ve got unique, signed copy

There are people who’s morals tell them to steal other people’s work. Some of these same people have the technical knowledge required to get around and remove the credit card encryption and thus distribute the files without sharing anyone’s private information.

There are people in between.

I tend to agree that the best way to decrease piracy is to make ebooks available to everyone at a fair price. Make them so they can be read on multiple devices freely.

There will always be pirates, but a lot of the in-between people will lose interest if they can get a good product fairly.

I’m not against some type of drm, if you can come up with a way for it to not infringe on my consumer rights, or as I keep saying, charge me a small rental fee instead of a high purchase fee. But I don’t know what you’re going to come up with that somebody else can’t get around. So it’s all just wasting time and effort and money while irritating the valuable honest customers.

What we need then is an e-book product and selling system that the majority of the world accepts as fair, so they can ignore the temptation to steal, or to accept stolen goods from others. As we have exactly that in place for many other products and services, there’s no reason to think we can’t accomplish the same thing with e-books.

If we can’t accomplish that, no social DRM is going to save us.