Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft Ebooks and Copy Protection
Richard Pennington writes "I just saw this article in Computerworld about Microsoft's copy protection scheme for its ebooks. According to this article, Microsoft's ebooks cost as much or more than paperback or hardbound editions. To top it off, if you upgrade your computer, you may not even be able to keep the ebooks you've purchased. Who exactly is Microsoft's market for these things?" See a previous ebook article.
It's been said before, but in the great tradition of slashdot, I will say it again. This is stupid! I will never pay for a book that is tied to my hardware configuration, OS version, or a single player of any type! If I buy a paperback, I can take it anywhere, period. It goes wherever the heck I want it to, can be sold to someone else when I'm done, or loaned to a friend for a while. I can give it as a gift, quote bits of it, or make a huge pile of xerox copies of it and keep them in my closet. An ebook that removes a substantial portion of these rights without a drastically reduced cost will never fly. People may purchase these at first, but just imagine for a second how confused a non-computer-expert would be if they tried to read their book at work, or had a new harddrive installed at Best Buy (complete with data transfer...)-- and their book quit working? After the first round of public acceptance, there will be public outrage at the ridiculous restrictions.
In the meantime, thank god for Project Gutenberg, a source of free, unrestricted ebooks.
Second, there is no widely-used personal identification system in place to keep e-books in the hands of those who purchased them. Plus, in the 'real-world', it's not exactly wrong to lend a book to a friend to use (or a thousand friends for that matter.) Who's going to stop me, the copyright police?
The bottom line is that there are always going to be those who pirate software/music/ebooks. And any attempt to thwart piracy will be in turn subverted. Take a look at alt.binaries.ebooks and you'll see what I mean. Just give it a few years...e-books will slowly become mainstream and a larger percentage of the electronic population will not know how to illegally obtain e-books and everyone will be happy once again. The end.
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Wooden armaments to battle your imaginary foes!
Does anyone really think the whole ebook concept will take off? I mean, a few years ago, they were putting the Collective Works of Shakespeare and other classics on CD-ROMs, only for people to discover that they really hated reading books online.
I love reading novels. If I didn't have a job, I'd probably read non-stop all day. On vacations, I can easily read about 500-800 pages per day. I can't do that online -- the potential eyestrain of reading a paperback in a well-lit room is nothing compared to intently staring at a monitor. Not to mention that I can't read an eBook on the bus, in the park, while I'm cooking, in bed, in the bath tub, etc. Laptops and Palms are not this convenient.
The current eBook model seems to assume that people read while seated at a desk. That seems reasonable if the book is merely a reference -- I like being able to search manuals while coding. But real readers read everywhere.
Microsoft can try to control eBooks all they want, but I don't see hardcore readers buying into the concept.
I can spell. I just can't type.
Pirates do not care. Somebody will whip the snot out of this, somehow. It doesn't matter that they are much brighter than the average bear, because the average bear is bright enough to copy what the pirate does. After which, of course, the book contents are copied to offline storage (CD-ROM) and stored on the bookshelf next to "Napster's Greatest Hits", volumes one through fifty-six.
When are the content producers going to learn? Publishers take them for a financial ride every bleeding day, and they have to sit there and take it. Or do they?
What if a bunch of geek types (like maybe open source folks?) make it a point to create new compensation methods for the content providers (writers, artists, etc.) and then educate them on the advantages (less publishing lead time, more money) and disadvantages (more risk, distribution blocking, etc.) of these methods?
Publishers might scream and rant. Most certainly they would blockade distribution through regular channels. They would probably even pay someone to crack whatever compensation scheme was being used, at least for the first few times, just to be able to say "see, it doesn't work..."
The above may be overcome with sufficient work. Sooner or later, the content providers will realise that they deserve a larger piece of the pie, and rightfully so.
*whup* "Get along, little electrons. Heeyah!"
Project Gutenberg redistributes only public domain etexts, but thanks to Disney, nothing written in the US on or after January 1, 1923, will ever enter the public domain.
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XGNOME vs. KDE: the game!
Will I retire or break 10K?
I recently upgraded my game machine from a PIII-350 to a PIII-800. This necessitated a new motherboard. When I rebooted after the install, Win2k crapped out. I flipped back into Linux, did some research, and discovered that you've got to reinstall Win2k when you flip motherboards.
Supposedly, this is because it's unable to find the new hard drive controller on restarts. Great feature, though.
Scientific test:
OPEN:
CLOSED:
Note that I refuse to share any circumvention methods with others. I believe the DMCA makes such sharing illegal--at least until we can get that law overturned. However, the DMCA has been interpreted by Judge Kaplan in SDNY to mean that if you can figure out a way to circumvent, then you can do so in order to make fair use of the encrypted work.
The reason I'm giving this information now is to warn authors not to believe what their publishers are telling them: that they should not publish online unless works are locked up in a format such as Microsoft Reader. Everybody should know now that there is no valid technology to prevent digital works from being read, shared, or copied. In fact, if it were possible, our civilization, built upon the open, real book, would be in danger of collapsing.
But you knew that already, didn't you? After all, I pointed this out two years ago, in the 1998 interview with myself, Battle of the Books. But at the time, too many gadget freaks were willing to swallow Microsoft's line that the display technology was key to getting people to read books online. Okay, now that you've done the experiment, browse through the other 12,000 free online books NOT in Microsoft Reader format: The On-Line Books Page or Internet Public Library, just for the English-language ones. After all, you own them!
Uh, it is true that PG publishes only texts first published before 1923. But it is not true that "nothing written in the US on or after January 1, 1923, will ever enter the public domain."
An explanation of this misstatement is long, but--many works (85%?) first published in the US after 1922, and before 1978, entered the public domain (and are still there) because the copyright was not properly renewed. It is perfectly legal to reprint them. PG does not do so because it is difficult to check copyright status for such works. The 1997 No Electronic Theft Act means a jail term of up to 5 years and up to $500,000 fine if a work with a retail value of $1,000 over a period of 6 months is even given away on the Internet.
The On-Line Books Page has a very useful guide to checking copyright on books, including some pages of renewals from the Catalog of Copyright Entries, scanned by volunteers including from PG.
Some of us do seek out post-1922 works in the public domain and reprint them online. However, the DMCA poses another problem: if the underlying work is in the public domain, it seems to be illegal under the DMCA to share information on how to "circumvent" encryption of an "eBook" such as in Microsoft Reader format. Thus these books do enjoy a de facto period of protection long after the copyright term expires.
If you are concerned about U.S. copyright term, please visit my web site for information about our lawsuit against the Bono Act, join in discussion and debate on the OpenLaw site, and please support Project Gutenberg and other online book projects. Thanks for reading!