The trashing of DRM continues
Now it’s the turn of audiobooks to make a stand against the repugnant tide of DRM. Mega-publisher Random House has sent an open letter to its partners saying it will provide DRM-free MP3 files from March.
“We believe that this move will allow for healthy competition among retailers targeting the iPod consumer, without posing any substantive increase in risk of piracy,” said Random House Senior vice president Madeline McIntosh.
The publisher says it has already completed a trial period in cahoots with eMusic, and that it believes no pirated audiobooks came from those DRM-free editions. Instead it says they were derived from editions that previously had DRM but were cracked, plus rips from CD.
“For tracking purposes, we watermarked all of the eMusic files and then hired a piracy watchdog service to monitor and report back to us if any of our titles appeared on the major filesharing networks,” explains McIntosh in the letter.
tech.co.uk