It does a good job of stopping casual copying between people who know each other. If my cousin bought a book on the Kindle, for example, and wants to share it with me, he or she won't be able to email me a copy due to copy protection. Unless that cousin is as savvy as I am and knows how to strip off the DRM (which is much easier than it looks, BTW). For the record, I only strip DRM for archival purposes. I am bloody well not going to pay multiple times for the same ebook just because I decided to move to a different platform. I also want security in case Amazon goes under or some yahoo decides to delete my account on a whim.
DRM does nothing to deter P2P copying since someone somewhere will know how to break the DRM, will upload it, and then the unprotected data will be passed on from torrent to torrent and network to network. And if the album, movie, or book isn't popular enough to spread like that, then it probably would have benefited from being distributed over P2P since it would raise its profile and produce word-of-mouth publicity that might eventually result in more legitimate purchases.
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