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Stallman: eBooks Are Attacking Our Freedoms
Barence submitted note of a paper written by RMS called The Danger of eBooks saying "Free software guru Richard Stallman claims consumers should reject eBooks until they 'respect our freedoms.' He highlights the DRM embedded in eBooks sold by Amazon as an example of such restrictions, citing the infamous case of Amazon wiping copies of George Orwell's 1984 from users' Kindles without permission. He also rails against Amazon for forcing people to identify themselves before buying eBooks. His suggested remedy? Distributing tax funds to authors based on their popularity, or 'designing players so users can send authors anonymous voluntary payments.'"
I exercise my freedom by not buying ebooks with DRM in them.
I remember when my dad was going to be sent to the gulag in Siberia for a typewriter he possessed. I was a kid and the KGB raided our house. I don't remember the exact details of why but they let him go. I do know the typewriter had the letters removed so it wasn't exactly illegal. He was copying a book that the government considered illegal/immoral. It was something about the Communist party and the mass murders; information that is now public.
With ebooks the copy part is easy these days. It can be distributed within minutes all over the world. Someone will break the encryption and publish it. I don't think we should reject ebooks, just not pay for ones with DRM in them. I doubt a lot of controversial books will have DRM in them anyway. If the information they contain is THAT good, someone will copy it by hand if necessary and distribute it. If you're worried about some cheesy novel and that amazon tracks you, find a warez copy. Information will be free, it'll just be a little harder to find than googling it.
If there was a right to give up freedom, shouldn't you be advocating for voluntary slavery?
The problem with allowing people give up some of their rights is that it not only effects them, but it will be passed down to their kids. In this case, a legacy of proprietary e-book libraries may have a very real effect.
Once, government was once seen as a protector of freedoms of the general public, and not just the bailer-out of large, well-connected banks and car companies/union. I would like to see a return of that role.
As is often the case, RMS is being sufficiently blunt, and proposing a set of possibly-unworkable solutions sufficiently far from the status quo, that he gives off that "extreme" vibe.
As is also often the case, it is pretty hard to argue with his thesis: Your traditional B&M bookstores, while hardly bastions of cypherpunk anonymity, were perfectly happy to take cash for whatever you felt like buying, and had neither the time nor the margins to use their cameras for anything other than trying to deter shoplifters.
Your online booksellers, Amazon etc, up the ante a bit by tracking your browsing of their inventory quite closely, and by virtue of the fact that(while this isn't impossible to get around, prepaid debit cards, and the like) the basic coin of the realm is credit/debit cards, generally establish an excellent correlation between buying history and buyer ID.
Ebooks up it still further, since they are tied directly to an account, and a CC, and frequently use(sometimes weak; but illegal in the US to break) DRM to control what you can and cannot do with what you 'own'.
Ebook readers up it still further, in that they can, and are known to, track not only your inspection of the inventory and eventual purchase; but your reading habits. The ones with location capabilities(such as all whispernet kindles), are known to report user location data to the mothership as well.
Obviously, most of these measures are somewhat slackly implemented, and a dedicated privacy-enthused individual with some time and technical skill can likely circumvent at least some of them; but that doesn't really change the fact that there has been an overwhelming increase(largely private sector and ebook driven) in the amount of transparency and control exercised over the population of readers. That simply cannot be usefully denied.
I suppose that when he spends as much time as he does twisting himself into knots to explain some of his positions, that it's possible he doesn't actually mean to sound as Orwellian as he does. But really ... force people to spend part of each day (on pain of imprisonment, if they refuse) working to provide food, rent, and iTunes accounts for writers that they'd never in a million years otherwise choose to support? I don't want to spend part of every day laboring on behalf of a guy writing a book about alien abduction and its impact on the arrival date of the antichrist, or about the personal triumphs of Hugo Chavez, or some pedofilic manifesto.
... because how shall we compensate that guy writing a book in a coffee shop in Brussels? Should US tax dollars pay his way through life, too? Or would Amazon have to work with the government in Belgium to tax the people of that country so that people in the US can read the bad Neal Stephenson rip-off the guy's working on? Do US taxpayers also get to pay "writers" who happen to be false personas representing propoganda committees in China, producing books extolling the virtues of censorship in a healthy society?
And of course Stallman will have to expand on the details a bit
Ah. Well, obviously this calls for a single world-wide government to tax one group and provide a living for another group. Not that said government would play favorites or use any sort of capricious policy in deciding which writers get money. Not that anyone would jack up download numbers to skew the how-much-money-should-they-get stats, of course. And if that was a problem, well, all we'd need would be more government monitoring of who's downloading what, right, Richard?
Why do people even listen to this clown? The fact that he'd even mention such an idea shows what a bunch of toxic and mixed/contradictory premises make up the foundation of his world view.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
Do you honestly believe that DRM prevents books ending up on TPB? It used to be that typing the title of my first book into Google gave an illegal download site as the top link. Right next to it were a load of books that were only available in hardcopy or DRM'd version. At my request, my publisher now has a clause to my contracts stating that they're not allowed to use DRM when distributing my books. It does nothing to prevent piracy, and it does piss off legitimate customers. You'd have to be a complete moron to think that was a sound business strategy. They had no objection to the clause, because they had no intention of using DRM.
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