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Libraries Use DRM to Expire Audiobooks
Valleye writes "CNN is reporting that some US libraries are using Microsoft Media DRM to automatically 'return' audiobooks checked out of their catalog. A patron with a valid library card visits a library Web site to borrow a title for, say, three weeks. When the audiobook is due, the patron must renew it or find it automatically "returned" in a virtual sense: The file still sits on the patron's computer, but encryption makes it unplayable beyond the borrowing period."
A perfect use for DRM tech. DRM always catches a bad rep. I for one am glad to see that technology still has a place in everyday america.
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Couldn't someone just use an audio program (cubase, cakewalk etc) to make a loopback recording, effectively making a non-DRM copy? This technology seems effective in expiration dates, but ineffective against piracy. Still.
This sort of technology is clearly nessisary, because someone who's had three weeks with the book already and can check it out from the library again for free whenever they want obviously needs to be inconvienced by having the copy they have stop working.
-- The act of censorship is always worse than whatever is being censored. Always.
If digital audiobooks can have infinite copies made of them and distributed to the Library's members then is there actually a need to have them checked back in?
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I think this is a perfectly valid use for DRM. It allows libraries to offer digital content, without screwing over the copyright holder. It's not like libraries are able to photocopy entire books and lend them out.
There is no way to be able to force people to delete it on their computer except via DRM. People who use this content, AREN'T paying for it (at least in most public libraries), and while it's most likely very easy to break the DRM, the library isn't forced to enforce their DRM, their responsibility (and liability) stop at placing the DRM onto the content. Unlike commercial copyright distributors, they don't need to make it more convoluted with a harder system to stop people from breaking the DRM.
It's unfortunate that a Microsoft DRM is being used (as I assume it can only be played on Microsoft systems), but it's most likely the easiest and most well known DRM to the people that put the DRM on the content (and the library staff can most likely offer trouble-shooting help with it as a result).
This is actually one of the few types of DRM that I can actually see as being worthwhile. That is, a type of DRM that emulates the current, physical limitations of property in digital space rather than manufacturing artificial restrictions.
This sort of feature makes libraries more accessible, without lmiting the borrowers any more than the previous system. If this is the sort of thing DRM is going to be used for, then good for it. I doubt it though.
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
Audiobooks... I can't figure out what the problem is with reading...
Anyway, this would seem to be an appropriate use of DRM technology. Of course I would imagine that with an audiobook the quality of the sounds is not as important as with music so someone really bent on keeping a copy would either burn it to cd if their system could do that and otherwise simply record from the audio output of their pc...
I wouldn't but then again, I would never get an audiobook... I prefer to read.
-if at first you don't succeed, stay the heck away from paragliding.
I guess as soon as you can watch Star Wars with this stuff, the DRM will get cracked in a few days.
Pure software methods always get cracked. Even hardware, as Bruce Schneier mentions, gets cracked, routinely. It really is just a question of how much time, and how much resources it takes to break it. The problem with digital stuff is that once you do it, you've cracked it for everyone.
The town of "Fucking" (that really is the name) in Austria had a problem with people stealing the signs. They recently moved to a new system, where the signs are really hard to steal. But as the mayor said -- "it would take all night to steal". Not, "you can't steal it" -- but it will take so long that someone will/may come along and arrest you before you make off with it.
With DRM, the guy gets to take the "sign" home for a few weeks at a time, until he can manage to crack it -- and once he does, you don't have any clue that he's done it.
http://www.thebricktestament.com/the_law/when_to_
From what I can see, Libraries make a fair bit of income from fees for overdue books. This helps to pay for new books, repairs, etc.
Also books in electronic format tend to cost more than the paperback alternatives for the amount of lending licenses necessary.
So who is going to pay for this? Is there going to be a charge for loaning the books?
I ment the Intellectual Property / Copyright one, not the library.
In the internet age where someone wants to claim ownership to various bitflows, it just simply doesn't work. The whole definition of storing and copying bitflows invalidates the entire system of intellectual property because of it's given nature. In this environment IP and Copyright is an outdated system blocking innovation.
Sooner or later the pressure will be too high as the internet gets into more and more areas of our life, it will force the rethinking of the information restricting laws.
This library attempt to introducte DRM is especially a bad case since libraries should be storehouses of information, not restricters of them.
Someone will surely try to point me to the positive sides of IP and Copyright. There are some, but as of today the benefits are far outweighted by the negative effect it creates, even on innovation. Without patent protection, people would still create, or even create much more freely. In the age of internet, it is even concivable that those people would cooperate strengthening innovation. It is the human nature to create, just look at the F/OSS movement.
Before someone brings up the example of drugs, let me try to answer it: those companies researching would still research, but they would also need to compete on manufacturing those drugs the best possible way and no such situation could arise where they try to sell AIDS medicine to poor african countries at the price of 20 times of the manufacturing costs only because of someone's intellectual property.
Let me put it this way: IP stiffles teamwork and derivative works. In today's age that is a huge loss, instead of the whole internet community working on something, only a selected few can, which makes it slow and expensive. Would huge corporations still rake wild profits from selling a drug? No. Would they make a decent profit from manufacturing them? Absolutely.
Let's get back to a world where we stick to physical reality, not imaginary intellectual property.
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And that's exactly what I thought when I saw this. Due dates are a way of managing scarcity: the library only has so many copies in stock, so they insist that copies only be out for a certain amount of time. The fine they levy for not bringing it back in time is not so much a revenue stream as an incentive for patrons to bring the media back in time.
Digital copies mean that given a single original, one can create any number of identical duplicates. It should herald an end to information scarcity. The problem is that too many businesses, content producers, etc. are totally incapable of crafting a business model based on abundance. In their defense, it may not be possible to do so.
That's the reason for the DRM in this case: rather than buy all the audio books themselves, the libraries pay a small fee, get a number of licenses, and can lease those out for a limited time. It's not so much the library that's using the DRM to check books back, it's that the company making the audiobooks available to them will only let them offer books for a limited time.
Congratulations to the libraries on finding a way to make audiobooks available cheaply to its patrons and eliminating the need to bring the books back, but deep down I'm still fuming. It won't end until someone finds a way to DRM money and jams it down the industry's throat... and actually, that gives me a wicked idea. But how to pull it off...?
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It is not a bookstore or cd/video rental shop. Patrons do not pay money each time they take a book out. They may be charged late fees due to scarcity issues, but the main idea is to enable the person to read the content.
The person can come back many times to take the book out again if he needs more time. But there is no point physically going to the library if it is a digital item on his drive.
In other words, even if the liscense required only a fixed number of people being able to view a title at a given time, it STILL would not make sense, because the DRM does not know if there are enough other copies to go around. It might be that nobody else is in fact interested in the file.
Therefore, the idea of a DRM "period" is bogus. At the very least, the user should be able to add another period if there are enough copies left in the stacks. It should not require an Internet line either, and it should be able to run on free software not some attackware that executes on my computer in a manner contrary to my wishes.
I have another point that may be unpopular with big business. It would be much better in my book if the library was able to purchase more items on a sliding scale as things got more popular, but not be bound to micromanage every copy on a user's hard drive.
You see, the point of the library is to ensure that everyone can get access to information, not just people with a lot of disposable income. You don't have to go buy the book or cd/dvd if your library has it. A library is not intended to be a marketing mechanism that makes you want to go buy the title. It is not intended to respond to the marketplace due to its competition with a bookstore/rental shop.
Considering that most people don't check the same book out of their library over and over again, a library normally wouldn't care if the user had a way to keep copies after returning them. The library has no responsibility for making sure that the user does not keep a copy on his drive even after the first time the user has read the copy, because it is there to promote access, not control access (except adult content maybe). If there is a good library nearby, you should never have to go to a store to get what you want.
Therefore, it stands to reason that:
What the hell are you thinking? Library's distribute this for free already, copyright pussies aren't making any money off of it, books should be totally open, no DRM, no auto deletion, information should be free.
And if you think any differently, you're wrong. Go re-evaluate your dumbass opinion.
It's a public library, paid for with public funds, but it distributes midia (sic) based on a Microsoft-only DRM plan. [...] Unless the libraries also offer the same media in some form that is available to Linux users, then I would fight this when it rears it's ugly head at my libbrary (sic).
In other news, many public libraries distribute books which can only be read by English speakers, even though those libraries are supported by tax revenues from people who do not speak English.
The goal of libraries is to make content available to as many people as possible, not to make exactly the same content available to absolutely everybody.
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- The license would be revoked if the time were outside the allowed period in either direction (no setting the clock to last year).
- The time of each play must be after the time of the last play (no setting the clock back after listening once).
- The time would be read periodically and used to adjust the playback speed of the audio (if you slow down your clock, it slows down the audio).
Under this scheme, the only thing you could do would be to set your clock to the check-out date when you first listened to it so you would have 3 weeks from when you started listening, rather than three weeks from when you checked it out.I am TheRaven on Soylent News
>Many people in this thread have already
>commented on how this is a perfectly valid use
>of DRM. I completely agree with that. I actually
>think that _any_ instance where the copyright
>holder puts DRM on something is perfectly valid;
>after all, they _are_ the copyright holder. So
>far so good.
However, most of the DRM part has NOTHING to do with copyright. Restricting how long you can view or read something has nothing to do with copyright. The copyright holder has no exclusive right for that. The copyright holder can control a few things such as copying and public performance due to being exclusive to them, nothing else. DRM however, add completely new control over things that has nothing to do with copyright.
Good points! I was thinking some of them while reading the posts here.
I can't believe people here fall for DRM as soon as they can get something for free..
What we need is people thinking on the whole system, not just wether they themselves can get something by giving less for it. When everyone does that, it stops the flow of money.
I have a solid income, yet I vote for those parties here in Norway that favours schools, libraries, human values and strengthening the local community. This will certainly take more money from my pocket, but will benefit more people.
Think people..
http://www.debunkingskeptics.com/
Content providers using DRM technology already find themselves in an escalating arms race against information consumers (their customers!) who wish to freely, indefinitely retain copies of "content" in any form which they encounter. The reality is this: 20 years ago, you could check out a library book and if you really wanted to, you could copy it for 5c/page. There was never any way to stop you from doing this, and there never will be. Now you can copy digital information for free. Put some DRM in the way, and you can get around it if you want to. If you have to, you can screen-capture an e-book and OCR the resulting bitmaps if you really, really want to. This sort of activity is only going to get cheaper and easier.
We now have the technology to share unlimited quantities of information worldwide, virtually instantaneously, with perfect fidelity. This is not going away, at least not without a severe, worldwide crackdown on copyright infringement which is probably not feasible anyway. The cat is out of the bag and there's no way for restrictive technology to keep up.
This is great if you're an information consumer, but the outlook is pretty dismal for the business models still embraced by most of the big content marketing corporations today.
What is revolutionary, I believe, is that humanity is on the verge of developing technologies that can be used to manipulate physical matter with the same flexibility we now use to manipulate bits. I'm not saying we'll have desktop replicators in ten years, but we'll have them eventually. They'll start out probably as simple biological devices and then improve rapidly. So when you can freely download the plans to synthesize some Viagra or THC or the latest antiretroviral drug cocktail to treat some pandemic flu in 2020, this blows the whole business model of the drug companies clean out of the water. No more scarcity, in yet another huge sector of the economy, just like today there are no shortages of free downloadable copies of any major movie/audio/video release.
And how are they going to slap DRM onto the design for a molecule??? And if you can get your hands on a sample of it, you will probably be capable of analyzing and copying it as effortlessly as you can rip a CD.
If we can just solve the interrelated problems of energy scarcity and pollution/global warming before it's too late, things are going to get really, really interesting in the near future.
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Alas, you are wrong. Audiobooks exsist under the same copyright law that books exsist under.
Just as a library may not buy a book, make copies of it and then give away copies of said book with out the copyright holders permission, a library may not make copies of audiobook and then give them away.
Copyright law has it's place, and thought it may be abused, it still protects the rights of the creators of works or those that pay for the work to be created.
Authors rely on sales for their livelyhood. How many of your favorite books would not have been written if the author had to wait tables or work construction to put food on the table and a roof over their head? Would you do your job for free?
You think that because an audiobook can be cheaply copied, that it right to do so. I wish people such as yourself would remember that just because something can be done does not make it right or fair to do it.
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
I though I would never see a good use for DRM but I could actually get behind and support this. The one problem it brings through is your locked into Windows. It wouldn't be such a problem if the companies got togeter and created one standarized DRM scheme that everyone could use, but no, that would be too perfect a world.
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I found your post interesting for its digression on DRMed money. Frankly, how is money not DRMed already?
I am having a Morpheus (from The Matrix) moment: Do you think that's gold in your pockets?
Any time they wish to devalue the money in your pockets they can print more of it. It has no intrinsic value of its own. We believe in money the same way we believe in God - it's all faith based until the music ends and you get stuck holding a wallet or checkbook notations of worthless paper.
Our whole economy is based on this idea - attenuated barter based on the exchange of items having no intrinsic value of their own (paper money and non-precious metal coins). It is because of the very elastic (inflationary) nature of the money that they can steal from you.
Gold is only better than paper money in one way - it is not very elastic and there is real scarcity. As gold is an element, unless you can solve the question confounding alchemists through the centuries you will find that the supply is indeed finite. You can discover more, but you can't just make more (via printing), and that's why it makes a better means of exchange. And interestingly, gold really does have many unique and interesting properties that make it valuable in itself - intrinsically.
Now what's better than gold? Real estate. That's how smart people "store" their money for safe keeping unless they are using it in other types of investments. Sadly, even the value of real estate is largely theoretical because they have ways to appropriate that too - they call it property taxes but it has the effect of converting the real property that you might own into something that you "lease" via continual payment of a property tax. When you fail to pay the tax, they just come and take your very real property away from you. Remarkable! And so few complain...
So I don't know about your "wicked idea" but I think they already thought of it before you, then they built up a way to continually set up the marks for the big con - we call it "government." They sold it to us via Art. I, sect. 10 of the Constitution - but they played bait and switch on us too. It's not gold, it's paper - and it's worthless. And it's not really real estate if they are just treating you like a serf on the land belonging to the banks/fedual lords.
Okay, I am done with playing Morpheus and trying to tell you how the world really works.
I honestly don't care who's DRM scheme it is. I hat eto see this type of lending program fail. With publishers recent push to keep electronic version out of the hands of more than one person, it seems to me that they are backtracking on long established practice. I can always purchase book and when I am done with it, I can give it to a friend or family member and they can read it and so on. Now with Digital books, because of the new scheme, If I purchase one, I am the only person who can ever read it. I cannot lend it to someone or donate it a library (well there are a couple of ebooks donation programs, but they are difficult to use and you never own the book). To see it work from the other way around, a library purchasing the ebook and allowing many people to read it, is wonderful and should be fostered, no matter who's DRM scheme is used. Bickering of what schemes is only goign to play into the hands of publishers. I hate to see people state they will never use it simmply because it has an MS branding. You hurt all of us that way. We need it to work first and get established, then we can bicker over the software.
"except that the copyright holder has the right to decide in what form something will be distributed and under what terms you can use it."
Does it really? What you're talking about is a EULA, but that has nothing to do with the copyright.
What you're saying would be okay for a private business.
But the public library is funded by taxpayers and has an obligation to serve the interests of the general taxpayer.
It seems to me this was chosen for the convenience of the library and not for the taxpayers who have overwhelmingly chosen the iPod.
As for your comment that "DRM is needed to not break the law", I've never heard that before! In fact, I borrrow books on tape, music CD's, and all sorts of stuff from my local library and none of them has DRM. So perhaps you're mistaken about DRM mandated by law?
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
I'm quite sure it's free to check these out too. In either case you're definately not allowed to keep items you check out forever, such as you are with a sound file.
;) )
Knowing that, do you really think any company, anywhere would license a library to distribute whole audiobooks without some sort of expiring DRM? a single book on CD costs close to $70, they're never going to let us give them away for free.
Libraries do exist to get information and literature to any and all who want it, but we don't make the stuff, so if there's a license involved, we have to follow it.
There are other libraries that do other things though. Since you can't easily copy things from your ipod to your PC, they load iPods up with audiobooks and then check out the whole thing, without any expiring DRM. That costs more though, and people still have to wait for a physical device to come back. But as long as I'm allowed to use my own headphones, that's really what I would prefer. (And not just because my wife is too cheap to let me buy an iPod!
HitScan
"That's the thing that fervent, DRM supports just don't seem to understand. If you can hear it, you can record it."
I'm sure they understand this just fine. They understand that it is impossible to make something absolutely copy-proof, so they settle for "sufficiently difficult."
If you're not sure what I mean, consider the auto security business or even the home security business. It's impossible to make a cost-effective auto security system that will thwart the thief who has sufficient training and who has sufficient desire to take your car. However, 99% of car thieves don't fall into this category, so a decent security system is usually good enough.
Slashdotters often think that because they have the motivation and the skills to jump through hoops to defeat DRM, then the public at large must also have this same motivation and skill. But, let's face it: when it comes to things technical, Slashdot readers are often up above the 90th percentile.
Sitting in my day care, the art is decopainted.
Authors rely on sales for their livelyhood. How many of your favorite books would not have been written if the author had to wait tables or work construction to put food on the table and a roof over their head?
Probably about all of them would have been written, given that pretty much every author has to do that. The number of authors who do not have to hold down a day job in order to finance their writing career is infinitesimal, and even the big names take years before they're making enough money to be able to work on nothing else.
Publishers make money. Retailers make money. Construction workers make money. Authors make books. If they wanted money, they'd be publishers or retailers, not authors. Just about everything pays better than being an author.
I wonder though how the industry will eventually respond now that the DMCA has given them commercial rights to restrict access to digital works.
Which would you rather have? Everybody forced to buy their own copies? Or being able to borrow them at the library?
I think it is only a matter of time before our libraries are targetted by the industry as unfair competition.
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Hmm, very interesting. This is most likely because it's not a general-purpose system. Desktop Linux is a much larger threat to them, that's probably why they didn't grant licenses.
;-)
Oh, and why is it that all companies making a deal with the devil are quite soon no longer in business?
(here's hope you managed to find a good job thereafter!)
Thank you for this interesting information!
I don't disagree with your stance and words, it's just not reality out there right now. If you buy a DRM'd ebook today, MS, Mobi, Adobe, I don't care who. It can only be used on your viewer that was verified to match the DRM'd book. So with that being said, I can not share a book or pass it on to anyone else, ever, if I bought it in electronic format. That's stiffling the format in my eyes. I prefer to read my books in an ebook format. It's just so much easier to do, to read, to carry, etc. Why should I be punished for buying in a different format? I still buy hardcover and paperback books simply because I want to share them with the rest of my family if they are worthwhile. I don't have that option with an ebook. It sucks and seems to me a quiet way for publishers to severely tighten their restrictions while trying to migrate people away from physical media. The library option would put a big crimp on that plan. I would be happy to buy my books and donate them to the library afterwards, if they could be used again. I would be happy to borrow ebooks from my library, but they are forced to purchase them today, and cannot rely on donates, such as my local rural library relys on almost completely. Therefore they don't have any ebooks. We need someone to push this in the right direction and get it going, once it is established, we can worry about who's ladder we used to escape the fire. If we argue about the ladder while we all stand in the burning building, then we all die and lose and the publishers win, because everyone who cares about the issue is tied up arguing about the provider and not watching the fire.