I posted earlier this week about DRM-free free eBooks. Now it looks like Random House is going through with DRM-free (though not $$$ free) digital audiobooks. It seems they’ve been doing this for a while through eMusic but will be extending it to all other online services (such as Audible and Overdrive I assume.) The most interesting part was this reason given for going through with the change:
[W]e have not yet found a single instance of the eMusic watermarked titles being distributed illegally. We did find many copies of audiobook files available for free, but they did not originate from the eMusic test, but rather from copied CDs or from files whose DRM was hacked.
In other words, people that legally purchased the music and could do what they wanted with it due to the lack of DRM felt no need to redistribute said content in legally questionable ways. Yep. Give us something we can actually use the way we want and we’ll pay for it. Don’t make us pay for something that locks us out of what we’ve paid for.
More at Boing Boing.
