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RMS On eBooks
ContinuousPark writes: "There a short but compelling piece on the latest MIT Technology Review by Richard Stallman. Imagine, he says, that you are forbidden to copy the latest eBook: 'no more used book stores; no more lending a book to your friend; no more borrowing one from the public library -- no more 'leaks' that might give someone a chance to read without paying. (And judging from the ads for Microsoft Reader, no more anonymous purchasing of books either.) This is the world publishers have in mind for us.' Creepy but more common every day, which is creepier."
RMS is a terrific programmer; I use his work every day, and am grateful for it.
THAT DOES NOT MAKE HIS OPINIONS REGARDING INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY WORTH SQUAT.
In this article RMS proposes that the Copyright laws should be abandoned because they interfere with his ability to copy the works of any author he pleases; he also proposes a sort of intellectual property shareware where the author is paid directly by the reader. How wonderfully naive.
The fact of the matter is that copyrights are essential - for without them there would be no ownership of any creative works by the author. RMS's own GPL depends on the existance of copyright law.
Digital media makes publishing (i.e. reproduction) of works easier - it puts the tools of the publisher in the hands of everyone. The legal reasons to protect the author from unlicensed reproduction are no different today than they were 100 years ago; the only difference is now that the tools to rip off the authors are more widely available.
Publishers are afraid of the these tools and are working to develop ways to preserve their current business model. FOOLS. The fact of the matter is that the prime economic of the internet is the elimination of middle-men. Be it car dealers, real estate agents, travel agents or book publishers - their economic model is doomed no matter how they try to preserve it. What will rise in it's place are new far more efficient models of direct contact between the creator and the end user. Without copyright laws to protect the authors these newer and more efficient distribution channels will never arise, and authors will lose all incentive to create new works.
"For some kinds of writing, we should go even further. For scholarly papers and monographs, everyone should be encouraged to republish them verbatim online; this helps protect the scholarly record while making it more accessible. For textbooks and most reference works, publication of modified versions should be allowed as well, since that encourages improvement."
This is just ridiculous. Nobody's going to write very much worth reading if the second I write something it goes public domain. I had a commercial pornographic site rip off some of my scholarly articles and put them on their site. According to Stallman, this is just peachy and my emails to them to enforce my copyright were oppressive. What a load of bullshit.
As an independent writer, the problem I see is that the large publishers are trying to get the sort of extreme copyright provisions which were clearly never the intent of copyright's original modest goals. So we have the Time-Warners and Disneys of the world saying "we own it and you can't even link to it without paying us royalties" and then you have the Stallmans and others of the world saying "lets just ditch intellectual property rights altogether."
The solution, btw, is something along the lines of the GPL that provides the sort of protection writers needs without the nonsense that copyright law is becoming (I'm aware that some mechanisms like this already exist, but they are largely deficient).
I regularly give people the right to republish the stuff I write on web sites, and could care less for the most part if they redistributed it on mailing lists, usenet, or whatever, but at the same time just granting anybody a blanket right to copy the stuff I write anywhere in any form is simply a bad idea.
Ironically, the people Stallman's sort of proposal would help would be large corporations. Without copyright protection, writers would be in even poorer positions from large corporations who could simply republish materials and screw the writer (or artist). Sure I'm going to spend a lot of time on an scholarly paper only to have a Time-Warner subsidiary republish it in a collection without having to pay me a dime.
When did Stallman become a corporate hack?
I recently read somewhere that Stephen King was shocked and dismayed when he found out that he could not read an eBook he wrote in it's final form because at the time there was no authorized reader for the Macintosh. What shocked and dismayed him was that even if it was possible for him to write or download a reader for himself, he could not because it was illegal (gotta love the DMCA). Unfortunately, before he could create any reasonable outcry/uproar a Mac reader for the eBook was released.
I agree with RMS in his article when he states
- Why is there so little public debate about these momentous changes? Most citizens have not yet had occasion to come to grips with the political issues raised by this futuristic technology. Besides, the public has been taught that copyright exists to "protect" the copyright holders, with the implication that the public's interests do not count.
I will take it one step further and add this:But when the public at large begins to use e-books, and discovers the regime that the publishers have prepared for them, they will begin to resist. Humanity will not accept this yoke forever.
The publishers would have us believe that suppressive copyright is the only way to keep art alive, but we do not need a War on Copying to encourage a diversity of published works; as the Grateful Dead showed, private copying among fans is not necessarily a problem for artists. By legalizing the copying of e-books among friends, we can turn copyright back into the industrial regulation it once was.
Once software truly becomes ubiqitous, UCITA and DMCA will face so much negative pressure that they will be repealed or toned down the same way the Communications Decency Act faced negative pressure once a critical mass of people got online and encountered difficulties because of it.
In today's entertainment world, culture is becoming defined by what we watch on TV, movies, books we read and the music we listen to. The exchange of ideas takes place easily over these mediums and popular thought is shaped by these corporations. When you can control the ideas of a civilization with the culture then you can derive unlimited income from them. Kids buy clothes pop stars wear, buy their music and watch their movies. We read the books on the New York times best seller lists and we buy the music we hear on radio stations that are owned by huge media corporations. We go to the concerts that are produced by the record labels. Essentially, our pop culture is produced, packaged and distributed and sold to us. We ingest it and come back for more. Like it or not, pop culture defines too many people's thoughts and ideas, so in effect, the media/entertainment industry owns culture and therefore owns our ideas.
Now comes the internet and a way to disseminate information anonymously and without cost. It is a boon for the free thinkers in the world who were beginning to become scarce. We can now exchange ideas without worrying about license fees and become famous without selling our souls and living rights to a mega corporation. The internet seems to threaten these very same media types' very existance. They can't control everyone and in this world, there are plenty of talented musicians, writers and artists that are not published for one reason or another who are more talented than the tripe they sell us in conventional avenues. Take MP3.com. I listen to music from there all the time and love it. I especially love it because the music is great and I would never have heard their music before without the site. A writer who has written an incredible work of fiction can now get world wide exposure and popularity over the net. From there they can enter the mainstream world of publishing. There are plenty of ways to make money under this business model. Just look at Linux. The point is, the net, and computers for that matter, appear to have become the magic genie in a bottle that breaks the strangle hold over the current businees model, which seeks to line the pockets of these greedy corporations and allow them to own everyone's creativity for their own purposes. It has been proven time and time again that the music industry would control every aspect of your music listening enjoyment if they could. Historically they have fought every type of recording, playing on unauthorized decks, and fair use. Luckily, the courts have told them you can't own a person's right to fair use. But what if this new digital age has played right into their hands?
With computers, they can now strictly determine how and when and where you enjoy their "art". They can control how much, what reader you use and who is enjoying it. They would have it so that you can't even loan your music out. Remember DIVX? You couldn't even share movies or play them on another person's DIVX player. And you had to keep purchasing more playing time. It was one of the first tests of this new trend. We are heading down a road where you can download a book or album and listen to it at your convenience, provided you use their player or reader, and you don't give it to anyone under ANY circumstances whatsoever. How many times has someone loaned you a good book, you read the book, and promptly went out and bought that author's other works? That will be gone forever if they had their way. Remember, they want you to enjoy their product on their terms, not yours. And they can do it now, with computers. When in the past they were frustrated with thir inability to completely control their product, now they see a way in which to do. And that brings me to the privacy issue.
On the internet, information is gold. Demographics. Tracking. Spending habits. AOL has made a fortune on selling user profiles. Equifax until recently sold your credit report to any company wishing to target consumers more efficiently. DoubleClick is poised to become the king daddy of all privacy violators if they are not already there. The fact is, my spending habits are gold to these people, another revenue source for them to exploit. Ebooks and downloadable music are just another way to gather more information so that they can sell it. And your privacy goes out the window. And don't delude yourself into thinking that privacy is not at stake here. Remember, these are people who actually say "We are customizing our service so that your shopping experience will be easier and more enjoyable. We are doing this for you because you asked for it." We didn't. I didn't ask for my every movement and purchase to be tracked so that it can sold to who ever has a large expense account. If you walked into a Blockbuster video and they suggested a movie you might want to see based on preferences, you might ask them why do you think I would want to see it. They then proceed to tell you all the things you have watched and bought all week long and every video store and bookstore and department store you visited. You would feel violated. That is what is happening on the web right now. Who needs Big brother when free enterprise can watch over you for them?
My suggestion, fight them. Don't use ebooks. Don't use downloadable music with a purchasing scheme. Use Gnutella instead of Napster (distributed and open source instead of central and closed. Read their company profile and who is funding them and see what road they are heading down.) Don't use any form of entertainment that helps fulfill their dream of total culture domination, because once all of culture is controlled like a product, then all is lost. Fight them anyway you can. Look at DIVX, which is a perfect example I mentioned earlier. They were tracking people's viewing habits so that they could target ads, and they were trying to lock you into being able to watch their movies on only approved machines with a purchasing model that assured a constant revenue if you wanted to watch the same thing again. Without these contraints, they has no business model. There was no choice in their scenario and it failed miserably. Why? We fought back. We put up web pages. We encouraged all not to buy one and convinced them it was wrong to buy the product. And we won. We can fight back.
So, let's deal with your assertions:
What a ridiculous assumption. Paper is expensive to manufacture and dangerous to the environment, especially considering how much of it we throw into landfills after a single use (never mind the toxic waste released during manufacture). The limit to electronic print distribution is the initial cost of a reader plus the limited display technology of current readers on the market. Don't expect a Palm III to become the standard for electronic newspapers. But new display technology coming down the road makes your point moot:
- Xerox PARC's Electronic Paper This technology takes two plastic sheets and immerses tiny beads, one side coated black the other white, inside a wax-like substrait sandwiched between the two sheets. With a small electric current any arbitrary ball twists in the substrait and thus changes it's color. This technology should allow for a flexible 8 1/2 x 11" sheet which can represent at least 300dpi... easily good enough for an electronic newspaper or book.
- Then there's AT&T's eink, another technology which promises similar display capabilities.
Based on what I've read these two technologies aren't the only up and coming new display systems for electronic printing, but they do appear the most promising. They should be cheap to manufacture, they're flexible, and they provide reasonable display resolution for the task at hand: reading. If you could buy a re-usable reader like this for twenty, fifty, or even a hundred dollars why would you ever want to buy a printed paperback book, magazine, or newspaper?Regarding rms's opinions on Copyright law... did you read the article he wrote? Did he say that all copyright law should be abolished? Did he say that all capitalism should be abolished? Did he suggest we would be better off working in Coal mines because that's real work? I sure didn't see anything like that in what he wrote.
Personally, given the DMCA and subsection 1201(a)(1) I'm seriously concerned that we're heading toward a society where even basic "fair use" rights for libraries, citizens conducting scholarly research, and the right to read an item multiple times are in serious jeopardy. Given the technical restrictions imposed by 1201(a)(1), a publisher could limit a reader to a specific city (just stick a GPS chip in that ebook reader), a specific user (just stick a fingerprint or retina scanner on the reader), and even have the publication wipe itself out upon first reading. As others (and myself in a previous post in this thread) point out, this could herald a real Orwellian world in which newspapers and publications could rewrite history after the fact; destroying the public historical record. And what happens if libraries, and their users, aren't exempt from paying a license fee for each access of an electronic publication?
And finally, where did Adam Smith ever claim that Capitalism depended on intellectual property law? That's a pretty ridiculous claim on the surface.
First of all I want to say that fundamentally I disagree with your final point, but that I find this an insightful and well written comment. I'll repeat what I understand of your point so that we can find common ground upon which to debate:
- The medium is not the information -- when information is tied to a physical medium it's possible to control copying the information by restricting access to manufacturing the medium.
- By monopolizing the manufacturing process for mass distribution of any arbitrary information, a manufacturer (in this case publisher) could make money exploiting the considerable capitol expense of "tooling up." IOW: printing presses weren't cheap so for end users it made more sense just to pay for the service of mass printing.
- This created a natural economic cycle of publisher producing a product and service for consumers which electronic copying breaks, because to copy electronically requires almost no capital expense (don't need to buy no expensive printing press).
- Therefore, publishers need some form of legal regulation which limits copying and allows imposing some form of "per-use" fees so that publishers and artists can earn a living, or the economic incentive to create new works will dissipate -- along with said artistic expression.
Are we on the same wavelength here?OK, so here's where I disagree given the DMCA that's currently our law:
While I think it's reasonable for publishers to require a fee for multiple use, the DMCA goes way too far. For example, I can accept that when I purchase an ebook I should have to pay twice if I want to display that ebook on two display devices at once; just like I should have to pay twice to run a program on two separate computers at once (or two separate instances of a program). Though I argue that an exception should be made for libraries -- readers who enter a library should have access to all the materials therein without the requirement for paying copying fees. But the DMCA, and specifically section 1201(a)(1) of the DMCA provides for Draconian copy protectionschemes. For example it would be possible to electronically limit a newspaper (eventhough there's an exception for newspapers in the DMCA the newspaper lobby is working hard to remove these exceptions; here's their reply comment to the US Copyright office regarding the DMCA and section 1201(a)(1) to this effect.) like so:
This could have the chilling effect of destroying the history of newsprint -- creating just what Orwell prognosticated in 1984 with newspapers that were edited for "truthfullness" after the fact -- and no one could either legally stop, or even track such changes to the historical record.
The way 1201(a)(1) in the DMCA is worded could very possibly kill off libraries in this country if we go all electronic in the publishing industry. This is far more serious than just the DeCSS and Matel (CyberPatrol) cases, though they threaten to set legal precedent which could harm citizens liberties dramatically in the near future.
I think what most people are reacting to here is not that these companies want to earn money selling artistic works... fine by me. But that they plan on implementing a monopoly on distribution which could very well effect the rights of individuals to distribute their own copyrighted works. Just look at UCI TA (Infoworld article) and how the provisions in these state bills (and at least one law -- Virginia) derail basic "Fair Use" for legal reverse engineering, copying for archival, and even allow for remote disabling software on demand by publishers... this is not democratic, nor does it even meet the basic guidelines of original Copyright intent. What people fear is that big business, along with our congress critters, are getting together to forge new laws which will greatly undermine our basic civil liberties WRT information flow and copyright. They've shown themselves quite willing to trample all over our basic human rights set forth in the Constitution and Bill of Rights (War on Drugs -- government stealing property without due process, spraying protesters willy nilly with chemical pepper spray and limiting their right to hold signs of protest in Seattle, police killing innocent unarmed citizens and then releasing confidential juvenile records in defense, using electronic surveillance technologies to spy on the world for private corporate gain, illegally funding the Contra war in direct violation of congress... the list goes on and on). So citizens are rightly fearful of what kind of authority might be handed over to monopoly content distributors over the next several years.
I really DO fear the possibility of these outcomes. This is NOT grand conspiracy theory; it's reasonable prediction based on past events. When ya'll figure out it's the grays, those bug eyed alien fiends behind all this -- well then we can start arguing about grand conspiracies.
Obviously this would be just as ideal here.
I also think that a huge part of the problem is that these companies are hellbent to drive out every little abuse, by both technical and legal means. This is counterproductive. Most people are basically honest. If you just tell them, ("treat this like a book") most of them will. They'll follow a reasonable license agreement.
Some won't, of course, but I suspect that the money spent to catch them, or to implement technical solutions to prevent it far outweighs the extra money made in sales were you able to perfectly prevent it. Yes, millions of teenagers copy crap around, but the truth is, those teenagers likely wouldn't have bought anything (or much at least) had they been prevented.
The cake is a pie
Simson Garfinkel, author of Database Nation among numerous other books, write an article for the Boston Globe nearly two years ago. His warning in that article was remarkable considering what happened with DeCCS. For those of you inclined to view RMS as an alarmist, read Garfinkel's article and consider the fact that he got it right.
The net will not be what we demand, but what we make it. Build it well.
RMS also wrote a dystopian story story Right To Read which was supposed to depict a worst-case scenario. It is a quick read. Take a look and consider the question it indirectly poses: How do we retain the freedoms we love?
The net will not be what we demand, but what we make it. Build it well.