For those here who are unconvinced and still believe DRM should exist, let me present some further evidence proving the contrary. 1. Polish ebook/audiobook sto

For those here who are unconvinced and still believe DRM should exist, let me present some further evidence proving the contrary. 1. Polish ebook/audiobook stores. In the polish electronic book market, DRM doesn't exist. Instead, it has been replaced with watermarks, which are prolific. Almost every ebook out there has one. I've seen some clear warnings displayed at checkout, so that people know what might happen if they share a book on line. This is a pretty good compromise. You can read the bookwhenever you want, you're not dependent on any server, you can read on any device you want to read on, and you can even share it with a trusted friend. However, if someone pirates the book (and someone will, regardless of DRM), it's much easier to track them. DRM is an obvious barrier to overcome, and usually no traces of the original downloader are left after stripping it. Watermarks, on the other hand, can easily be forgotten about, and, if done well, even hard to detect. This is not that easy to achieve in ebooks, as they're fundamentally made of text (though you can embed them in covers, images etc), but for audiobooks, movies or music, it's pretty trivial. 2. Streaming. Some say DRM for music streaming is absolutely needed, but I disagree here. For those who want to do it, downloading music from streaming services is pretty trivial. Playlist migration tools from one streaming service to another exist and are widely available, and ripping music from Deezer, on a mass scale, is also pretty simple. A tool called Deezloader exist and can get anything from Deezer, and their database is pretty similar to what other music services have. It's not as easy to find as it used to be (currently residing on a wiki on notabug.org and a Telegram channel as far as I know), but it's certainly doable. I could use it to get all my music out of my Spotify in 10 minutes... but somehow I still didn't. I, as well as other people, value the recommendations, the instant search, the syncing of libraries between devices and the social functions too much to bother. I know people who use it regularly, mostly to i.e. rip stuff out to play in a car that only accepts mp3s on pendrives, but they stil are active users and subscribers of streaming. People who don't care that much usually use youtube and rip using shady websites anyway. That's pretty onvincing evidence that removing DRM wouldn't change much, at least for me. 3. Piracy. Piracy exists. It existed and it will,, regardless of DRM. DRM doesn't change the piracy landscape in any substantial way, and removing it won't change it either. Making the files magically easier to download won't mean that they become magically easier to host. Those who want to host them now can do it already, i.e. by downloading existing torrents. The people who actually might benefit from DRM stripping are consumers themselves. Pirates will still do their things, but we, the consumers, would be able to do much, much more.