文章主张不要给电子书加上 DRM（数字版权管理），讨论这种保护方式对读者体验、所有权与使用便利性的负面影响。
2025-10-09
"We swear that's what's happening!"
So you've written a book! Congratulations! It's no small feat—I know.
And the last thing you want is for some ne'er-do-wells to steal your e-book, right? I mean, you put in the work, and you want to get paid.
And you've heard about this DRM thing that supposedly prevents them from doing exactly that! Problem solved!
Except that by putting DRM on your books, you're preventing people who purchased the book from keeping a copy of it in their own library to read whenever they wish. Seems right that if they bought it (unless you're renting your book out), that they should be able to keep what they purchased. Also, maybe they buy a different e-reader later and want to be able to read their already-purchased books on that other reader. DRM can prevent this from happening—
News Flash! Your DRM-protected book has already been pirated. It happened the moment you released it. Someone stripped off the DRM and now it's available on the Internet for free.
Well, you think, this is just an arms race, right? We need to make DRM that's harder to strip off!
That'll solve it.
News Flash! Your Enhanced-DRM-protected book has already been pirated. Turns out that to make a book readable, you have to show it on a screen, and computer vision and OCR is a thing. And it can be scripted with web viewers so ripping a book is as simple as running a program on it.
Well, we clearly need a mechanism to prevent screenshots of book pages. Let's build that into the operating system even though that tramples on our rights to take screenshots.
News Flash! Your Enhanced-DRM-protected book has already been pirated. People have cameras that can take photos and they've photographed every page (doesn't take long), and run that through a program that rebuilt your e-book without DRM.
OK, let's require all cameras to refuse to take photos of all protected book pages (somehow). Now we have it.
News Flash! Your Double-Enhanced-DRM-protected book has already been pirated. People are reading the book, and then typing in the words to produce a new DRM-free version.
Fine. Let's require computers to not allow you to write any of the words in the order they appear in any copyrighted work ever.
News Flash! Your Ill-Advised-Double-Enhanced-DRM-protected book has already been pirated. People are reading the book, and then typing in the words in reverse and then using a program to fix it up.
Sigh. I have the solution. Let's require computers to not allow you to write any of the words in any order if any of those words appear in any copyrighted work ever.
Problem solved.
I'd like to acknowledge that there are em dashes in this blog entry and I'd like to assure you, reader, that zero AI was used in the creation of this blog post. I use em dashes because they're right and proper and I'll be damned if I'm going to let some stupid LLM take that away from me. Besides, if an em dash becomes too much of an indicator and you only read content with hyphens, slop generators will just instruct their AIs to not use em dashes, or they'll put a one-line filter on the output that changes them. In short, it's a losing battle and you should just embrace human authors who use proper punctuation. Hugs!