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DRM and the Destruction of the Book
Hugh Pickens writes "EFF reports that Cory Doctorow spoke to a crowd of about a hundred librarians, educators, publishers, authors, and students at the National Reading Summit on How to Destroy the Book and said that 'anyone who claims that readers can’t and won’t and shouldn’t own their books are bent on the destruction of the book, the destruction of publishing, and the destruction of authorship itself.' Doctorow says that for centuries, copyright has acknowledged that sacred connection between readers and their books and that when you own a book 'it’s yours to give away, yours to keep, yours to license or to borrow, to inherit or to be included in your safe for your children' and that 'the most important part of the experience of a book is knowing that it can be owned.'"
Being able to give away, bogart, lend or to borrow, pass as inheritance, or roll up and smoke a book is possible because the book is yours because you own it and the Doctrine of First Sale formalizes these possibilities.
One of the many things wrong with digital restrictions management (drm) technologies is that it tries to do an end run around the democratic process and eliminate these rights, some of which are codified in the Constitution. Some would assert that not only is the constitution the foundation upon which the country has been built, but also that it represents freedom and democracy itself. So these affronts by Bill Gatesists and the other 'freedom-hating' (tm) digital taliban, can be considered as affronts to the US itself if not also to higher ideals.
It may sound harsh to some fanbois, but step back and take off that 'with a computer' clause and see if what they are doing is acceptable. If not, then you know what to do.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
yea but with ebooks technically letting your wife read the book is illegal and wrong and she has to buy her own copy.
40 years from now your kids are all grown up, and you pass away in your sleep. As they go through your stuff, they pick up the tom clancy paper backs and think about how you used to read them. Or they find a non working ebook reader and the DRM prevents them from knowing what kind of books you liked to read.
Pick one. It will happen. no one lives for ever. Memories must be preserved some how. DRM laden technology will prevent it.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
A physical book has a sort of built-in DRM! If you give it away, you can't read it anymore. It can't easily be copied (it requires a lot of scanning and printing to do that). Isn't that kind of thing also part of the intention of DRM?
IMHO though, the world has changed, we now live in a world where information can be copied without any physical restrictions. So I hope that one day humanity will be able to live in that world, instead of trying to enforce old ways onto us with DRM. I'm sure that in a world where information can be copied freely, there can also be culture, people who make money, artists, and so on.
Last time I checked the message was firmly attached to the medium. I have 250 year old books who still confirm to that basic principle.
In your eagerness to outsmugg Doctorow you missed his message completely, focussing on the medium itself. I 'own' a couple of e-books from the palmpilot-era which, thanks to DRM, are unreadable now. I can remedy that with an emulator, but the current generation of DRM 'promises' online checks which will fail when technologies change or companies fail.
I get to keep the medium, a bunch of scrambled bits, but somebody will steal the content of DRM-ed books, one day.
DRM will destroy books. Individual ones, and 'book' as generic term. Knowledge will no longer be transfered, it will be rented out for a limited time only.
And here I was thinking the content of the book was the most important part.
To be frank, you've missed the point. The content is just something that you use to achieve something. To be happy, to be sad, to share something with your friends. To fix your car; any time you want. To know what is wrong with your pet hamster and how to heal it. To learn to ski better. Up till now it has also been used to achieve richer authors but with very specific limits.
The aim here is to use control of the content to be able to tax your ability to do all those things I mentioned above and more. When you remember something from your hamster book about a strange rare disease, you'll have to buy the same book all over again because now Amazoid E-Reader IV doesn't support the books you bought for your now broken kindle. Even if your book reader is still working, your key to the content will have long ago expired. If you are really unlucky, they may force you to buy the upgraded new edition.
=~ s,(.*),<sarcasm>$1</sarcasm>,g if any_point_you_wish();
I suspect that the answer to all of the above questions is: no.
I'd be far more accepting of DRM if copyright law went back to being a reasonable period. It's very easy today to envision an eternal copyright starting the day Disney created anything they feel is of value, and continuing in perpetuity thereafter.
If copyright was 10 or 15 years, I'd be OK with draconian DRM restrictions on the things that are under copyright, provided there was a way to break it when the items go into public domain. As it is, though, anything written after my father was born is unlikely to fall into public domain before I die.
Apart from reading it, which is the best part of course, I prefer owning a book. I enjoy sharing them with friends. I appreciate the simple fact that every book I've ever purchased is mine forever (barring damage or theft, of course). No corporation or government has the right to remove my books from my control, and it's impossible to change them - you'd have to come to my house and get them.
If I could buy an e-book knowing that in a few years the DRM would be lifted and I could freely share it, and knowing that my Doctrine of First Sale rights would be protected in the meantime, I'd seriously consider some form of e-book reader. But recent events and the history of copyright holders have demonstrated otherwise, and the length of copyright means that the money I'd spend on e-books is for a short-term rental on a book, and if I want to rent my books I'll donate more money and time to my library and get them that way.
Heck, I'd be happy with an analog of the current "hardcover / paperback" model. For the first year or two of a book's existence, it could be available only in a high-priced, heavily DRMed version that is not allowed to be shared. After a year or two, anyone who spent the money on the hardcover then gets an unlock code that allows them to freely share and keep their copy without DRM, and an unlocked "mass market" version comes out at a discounted price that can be shared. I'd happily buy a deeply DRM-encrusted bookreader and buy new releases if I knew there was a sunset provision on the DRM that would allow me to keep and share them in a reasonable timeframe. I'd even pay the same I do now for a new release, as long as the contract clearly stated that the book could be unlocked in a relatively short period.
Paper sucks. Paper is inconvenient, and clumsy, and expensive, and harder to read, and bulky, and subject to damage, loss, and theft.
** BUT IT'S MINE **
And until e-readers can fulfill that desire, I have no desire to get one.
"This post contains words, known to the State of California to cause thought. Wash brain thoroughly after reading."
You have obviously never read "1984". Either that or you don't quite understand its implications.
If there are no permanent records that are immune to alteration (hint: no electronic record is immune to alteration), those who can alter the records determine what is history and what is fantasy.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
Cory's Sacred Ancestors (or whoever the hell he was referencing)
He was referencing the founders of the United States who write its constitution. And your "effect the scanning and distribution of a book to 100,000 strangers on the Internet would have on the publishing industry" is entirely bogus. It is a positive effect, not a negative one. Doctorow gives his books away for free on his website, yet is on the New Your Times bestseller list. Care to explain that one, Einstein?
He explains why in the forward to his book Little Brother. There's no way you're going to buy a book by an author you've never heard of, but there's no risk in checking one out from the library (there are way more than 100K libraries, each with a copy for everyone to check out and read), and if you like the author's work, THEN you're likely to buy.
Nobody ever went broke from piracy, but many, many artists and authors have gone hungry from obscurity. Your argument is as bogus as Jack Valenti's "the VCR tape is to the movie industry what Jack the Ripper is to women". You see how that one worked out.
Valenti's and your statements are entirely false, have been proven false, and there is not one shred of evidence that there is any truth whatever to them. Logic alone should tell you they're bullshit.
Free Martian Whores!
You've got two out of three right.
Unless you're a corporate creep like Vince Flynn, you're not writing books to get rich. You care a lot more about getting your words into peoples' hands than you do about socking away millions and paying off shareholders.
There's a notion around now that a successful author, or musician, deserves more than just living a comfortable, even lavish lifestyle. They deserve to be a multi-billion dollar phenomenon. Not necessarily because that "content creator" wants this unspendable wealth, but because he is actually the tip of a corporate pyramid that needs to be fed. At the bottom of the pyramid are some shareholders that the "content-creator" will never know.
Digital distribution of content should be about allowing creators to distribute their material more easily, more cheaply, more quickly and widely. Not about maximizing the profits for a phalanx of money-sucking barnacles. Those "scared" corporate-types you mention are all about the latter, and they'll hang on to their dysfunctional system as long as they can.
If you approach digital media to benefit creators, you'll get more good stuff to enjoy. If you approach digital media to maximize profits, you get a lot of expensive dross and grandmothers getting hauled into court by the RIAA.
You are welcome on my lawn.
If copyright was 10 or 15 years, I'd be OK with draconian DRM restrictions on the things that are under copyright, provided there was a way to break it when the items go into public domain.
Then you misunderstand the purpose of DRM. The main purpose of DRM is to do an end-run around copyright expiration - so works "protected" by it *never* go into the public domain.
Imagine you're a publisher, and you want perpetual copyright, even though you know the highest law in the land says you'll never get it. What's the next best thing? Complete control over the books you sell - so you can prevent anyone from copying them ever again, and can even "recall" them if you want to. And you lobby for a law that makes it illegal for anyone to talk about how to circumvent that control.
At it's core, copyright is the ability to say "you're not allowed to say that, because I said it first." It is (supposedly) a compromise between the public and authors. In order to improve our culture, authors are given a limited right to exclude others from exercising their right of free expression.
DRM is a betrayal of this compromise - the public fulfills their part, but the authors never have to fulfill theirs. DRM is the antithesis of copyright, and rather than making laws to protect DRM, any work that is "protected" should be immediately be stripped of its copyright status.
After all, if DRM really worked, they wouldn't *need* copyright law, would they?
I'd add a couple of extra concerns:
- it makes it very easy for repressive regimes to track who bought what: a handful of authentification servers have that info. granted, we may not feel concerned by that right now, but a good part of the world is, and you never know what will happen to us later on. Recent events show that corporations are all too happy to oblige any request from any "big market" government.
- it even makes possible to recall a book, possibly to change it, which conjures uneasy visions of the Ministry of Truth.
The Cloud - because you don't care if your apps and data are up in the air.
This kind of stuff would have made Winston Smith's day job so much easier. Rewrite history then push it out so as to override previous copies. And the rulers of the Fahrenheit 451 world could simply revoke the digital certificate of ... every book or every book with ideas they want suppressed. Sound like the media cartels' wet dream? It is, it is. And that of would-be tyrants? Even more so.
I was getting halfway interested in the Kindle until the 1984 debacle. That shows that DRM has a much darker potential than its proponents will ever acknowledge. Fuck all that shit. (Not picking on Amazon; I like it and have had an account there for years.) Corporations cannot be trusted to have any interest in freedom of any kind for the public. No doubt their accountants would show it as a negative (if intangible) item on their balance sheets.
If you want your life to be different, live it differently.
The thing is, in the United States, we regularly limit free speech rights. For example, speech that incites criminal acts (for example, a riot) is regulated. Commercial speech is regulated. Copyright limits freedom of speech. Society would not function otherwise. If we define the sharing of information as freedom of speech, then any company with your credit card number could freely share it with anybody else. Your credit card company or bank could share your history of purchases with your insurance company so they can set rates based upon your diet, your recreation habits, and the power tools you own. All of this is information, yet we see fit to regulate the ways in which it is shared.
I agree with you that DRM is bad and it is an abuse of copyright and the right of first sale. Trotting out the old hacker belief that "information wants to and ought to be free" and "freedom of speech trumps all" does not reflect the mindset of the framers of the United States Constitution nor does it reflect the mindset of society today, regardless of how simple, romantic, and seductive the argument seems.
Who says authors have to make money by selling books? Here's how I see the future for authors:
1) Up and coming author puts his first books on the net for free, hoping to gain readership.
2) Author requests donations from those who like his book (yes, we're at "Profit!" at step 2, but it's small so stay with me here)
3) Author gains a good sized fan base and a reputation (think Dean Koontz)
4) Author announces a future book, and sells "access" to parts of the writing process to his fans ("Profit!" again)
5) Author now has a run-away hit series ala Harry Potter or Twilight (or, god forbid, another Dan Brown book)
6) Repeat step 4, only with more Profit!
7) Author sells movie and merchandising rights for big Profit! (this is where authors get rich nowadays anyway, not from book sales)
http://www.mhall119.com
Unless you're a corporate creep like Vince Flynn, you're not writing books to get rich. You care a lot more about getting your words into peoples' hands than you do about socking away millions and paying off shareholders.
I think this is important to note: people wrote books long before copyright. They wrote because they thought what they were writing was important, or they wrote because they wanted to be famous and admired. Guys wrote to get chicks, because some chicks dig smart creative types. People wrote for all sorts of reasons even when it made them no money whatsoever.
Same with music, really. I frequently try to make this point when people talk about, "If we don't have strict copyrights and DRM, no one will make music anymore!!!" No, people wrote music and performed music before the invention of the copyright. People are musical creatures. They love singing and dancing and performing for each other. It's fun and helps you get laid. The fact is that you could outlaw all musical performances, and what would happen is people would run underground musical speakeasies. People might even protest by singing songs in the street for free, even knowing they'd go to jail. Some people love music that much.
Likewise, if you outlawed writing books, people would still write them and distribute them, and there'd be people who would go to jail for smuggling illegal books. You can't stop people from writing books. I've probably written a books-worth of posts on this site for free, and I'd be pretty annoyed if you tried to stop me.
This is a good place to point out that Amazon unilaterally had all copies of 1984 deleted from all customer's devices, totally screwing many people up in the process. Sure the refunded the purchase cost. Big deal. They also apologized later for doing it. But this sent a very clear message that they cannot take back: They can trash your 'property' on a whim, and there is nothing you can do to prevent it as long as you abide by their DRM restrictions.
They say they won't do it again. Sorry, but once trust is lost, is VERY difficult to regain.
At least, it is for people who actually pay attention and think. What upsets me the most is that most consumers don't care enough to change their purchasing habits even after they've been bitten.
Except in very rare circumstances I avoid audio CDs, after what Sony did. I also don't buy Sony products anymore. Sony should have But when I see how many people still purchase Sony products, how PS3s are flying off the shelves, it makes it really hard to care. When the forementioned incident happened with Amazon, schadenfreude is the best description of how I felt. There have been SO many well reported incidents across SO many industries, that people have effectively waived their right to be outraged when such things happen to them.
Society at large flat out doesn't care. Those that know what's going on and care enough to do so will ALWAYS find a way to crack things like DRM so that they can at least protect themselves. Those that choose to ignore the damage that DRM causes, can go cry in their rooms because they should flat out have known better.
I can only hope that if enough people get hurt by DRM they will eventually complain loudly enough to stop this nonsense.
My first run in with eBook "quirks" didn't take long to happen. I received a Kindle for Christmas, and having already scouted out some prospective books to purchase I had some novels in mind. The first book I read was Flood by Stephen Baxter - I just finished that last night. Flood is followed by its sequel - Ark (by the same author). However, upon trying to buy Ark I couldn't find it anywhere on the Amazon kindle store. I recalled seeing it when browsing before (that's why I bought this series first, because I noticed both books were available in kindle editions) - however now it was missing. Trying a few different things, I logged out of my Amazon account. Low and behold, the ebook appears for sale! Kindle edition and all - however I noticed a very small notice (almost fine print) below the "Buy with 1-Click" button that read: "Due to copyright restrictions, this title not available in the United States". WTF! It took changing my address to that of a Canadian friend of mine in order to be allowed to purchase this book - thankfully they still accepted by US-addressed credit card.
Copyright restrictions and such on sale of books/music/movies is extremely stupid in my opinion. In the end all it took was changing my address twice - once to Canada and then back - but it's the principle of it all. I'm happily reading my book now; a book that just to purchase I had to be dishonest about where I lived simply so I'd be allowed to purchase it.
DRM is another issue I'm worried about, however with the advent of tools to strip the Kindle and nook DRM, I'm not to worried about moving my books to a new platform once a better read becomes available.
everyday is another shooter.