DRM: Read Free or Die!
The team's conclusion: Dropping DRM restrictions leads to decreased piracy.
Come again?
It all comes down to competition, the researchers say. The competition between legal digital downloads and traditional retailers selling a physical product helped reduce prices. Devavrat Purohit co-authored the Duke and Rice study. A professor of Business Administration at Duke's Fuqua School of Business, Purohit says book publishing is still several steps behind where they saw the music industry during their study. Publishers have yet to fully understand the role DRM plays for their customers, he says, but can learn much from the music industry even though, as he says, e-readers "haven't been adopted on a large scale like they were with music players."