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.

Comments

My (Redundant) Opinion

[raygundan]

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.

Re:My (Redundant) Opinion

[AbbyNormal]

Preach on Reverend!
This is an absolutely RIDICULOUS idea! I think M$ is just shooting themselves and the ENTIRE e-book industry in the foot. First of all, I personally find it difficult to read a full book online as it is (Stephen King's "The Plant"), but paying MORE than a paperback is silly! This is just going to turn more people off and eventually label ebooks as just "another one of those Internet fads". Most non-expert users who are not aware of this fact are going to be extremely annoyed when their book that they payed MORE for than the paperback, suddenly disappears. IMHO, go to a bookstore pick up a paperback. Its portable, flexible, and ways less than 10 pounds (maybe not the "Complete Works of Shakespeare").

Re:My (Redundant) Opinion

[DaveHowe]

I agree - I was intending to play along with the "$1/chapter" idea until I did the math, and worked out that the resulting ebook provided he completed it and didn't bug out when revenue dropped would cost more than a paperback of the same length, and would still require me to print it out if I wanted to read it away from my screen.
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Seriously...

[don_carnage]

Microsoft is taking a blind stab at a problem that really isn't clearly defined yet. First off, there is no set format for e-books. If I want to read a book on my Palm, it usually has to be in PDB or PRC format (although I could always use a converter) and if I want to read a book on my PC, it can be in HTML, PDF, TXT, DOC or RTF. None of the listed formats have any sort of built-in copy protection.

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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Re:Seriously...

[rocur]

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?

And why should they stop you? Under section 109(a) of the US Copyright code, the owner of a particular lawfully obtained copy is allowed to sell, give away, or loan for free their copy without the copyright holder's permission. Section 109(b)(1)(A) takes away the right to rent or lease your copy of a sound recording or computer program, but not a book (I assume this is a DMCA addition). IANAL, but I'd say that Microsoft's copy protection prohibits you from exercising the rights granted under 109(a).

And lets not kid ourselves, Microsoft is not the bad guy here. They are just doing what the publishing industry wants. All of the competing commercial e-book standards have heavy copy protection. It has been a thorn in the side of the industry for years that I can buy a book and then let my wife read it without paying for it a second time. What they (and the music and movie industry) really want is "pay-per-view". Until all PCs/PDAs/etc contain fingerprint or retinal readers, the best the industry can do is to lock the content to the device.

Uhm, does anybody have a crack for this yet?

[human bean]

Sorry, just had to say it ;-).

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.

Gutenberg will never take off.

[yerricde]

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!

Reader cracked

[EricEldred]

Scientific test:

1. Go to http://ebooks.barnesandnoble.com and select "American Literature" from the free books in the left panel.
2. Download one of the free eBooks, let's say "The Big Town" by Ring Lardner.
3. Note that you don't have to activate your Microsoft Reader or Microsoft Wallet if you just want one of these free books--but you do need to download Microsoft Reader, so you must use it only on a Microsoft Windows machine.
4. Now visit the Eldritch Press site and download the same book in HTML form, http://www.eldritchpress.org/rl/bigtown.html --(note that the text and illustrations were produced by "circumventing" the Microsoft encryption scheme, demonstrating that it cannot work).
5. If you like, download the TrueType fonts Berling and Berling Italic.
6. Read the two books on your favorite computer and display.
7. Observe that the open book was actually proofread and errors corrected.
8. Help me make a table that compares the two, pro and con, feature by feature.

OPEN:

1. Blind readers can "read" it with text-to-speech synthesizers or Braille printers.
2. Reader can copy it and share it with a friend.
3. Since it's on one web page, searching and copying text is easy.
4. Text can be piped into another Unix-type program for word count, glossary, index, concordance, dictionary etymology or corpus, reformat for another computer program, computer translation aids, and whatever you can think of.
5. Cascading style sheets in HTML code make it easy to create a better layout, typography, or style.
6. It's possible to link to other works on the web such as other Ring Lardner stories or sites such as Eldritch Press's Lardner site.
7. ....what else?

CLOSED:

1. Works only on Microsoft Windows.
2. Have to have a credit card for Microsoft Passport
3. Locks book against blind readers
4. Proprietary user interface goes against all World Wide Web and Microsoft standards
5. Reader reveals private demographic information to publisher
6. Used bookstores go out of business if this technology widely adopted.
7. Encryption prevents fair use of a work in the public domain--not available to be cited in a student's paper, anthologized in a teacher's course book, and so on.
8. ....what else?

9. 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!

Re: Copyright term

[EricEldred]

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!