I mentioned yesterday that as part of the Copyright Office’s 3-year DMCA exemption hearings, the office would hear arguments on whether to permit cracking the CSS encryption on DVDs. Although it doesn’t directly have anything to do with e-books, I found this coverage by Ars Technica/Wired of the CSS issue interesting enough to bring up in a general DRM-related sense. As with the last go-round, one of the proposals was to allow filmmakers and other clip-users to decrypt DVDs so as to excerpt clips for use in films and for other fair uses. This use was authorized last time,...

Here’s an interesting post from the International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF), the people responsible for the EPUB format. Bill Rosenblatt of GiantSteps Media Technology Strategies lays out a proposal for a “lightweight DRM” standard for EPUB that would be more permissive than some of the “heavyweight” DRM systems currently in use. The idea is to prevent “oversharing” such as peer-to-peer while allowing users to make most of the sorts of uses they take for granted with physical books. As Rosenblatt explains, the idea is not to be uncrackable—he specifically admits that “we expect that a lightweight DRM (in reality, any DRM)...

I found a press release in my mailbox this morning about the launch of Eric Hellman’s crowd-funded Creative Commons republishing initiative for copyrighted works, Unglue.it (which we’ve mentioned a few times already here). The site has officially launched just now, with campaigns for the following five books: Michael Laser, 6-321 Joseph Nassise, Riverwatch Nancy Rawles, Love Like Gumbo Budding Reader, Cat and Rat Open Book Publishers, Oral Literature in Africa, by Ruth Finnegan. The...

As I was browsing through Zite last night to find more stories to blog, I came across what was effectively an advertisement (though Zite apparently considered it a blog article; clearly the program needs some fine-tuning) for an EPUB DRM removal tool. I’m not going to link to this advertisement, because I don’t want to provide it with even a smidgin of search-engine-optimization respectability. Suffice it to say this program, “ePub DRM Romoval,” sells for $29.95 and offers “easy access to DRM-free ePub ebooks for your iPhone, iPad, iPod touch, NOOK, Sony Reader and more ebook reader...

They’re nowhere near as big as Tor, but the Bookseller reports that Duncan Baird Publishers, a UK publisher of illustrated mind, body, and spirit and cookery books, has announced it will be removing restrictive digital rights management (DRM) from 150 of its current and 80 future e-book titles in order to provide a better experience for readers. It is not clear from the Bookseller piece what percentage of Duncan Baird’s overall catalog this represents. Duncan Baird is writing to authors to tell them of its decision, which has met with mixed response. “There are some authors...

In honor of May 4th, the Day Against DRM, all O’Reilly, No Starch, and Rocky Nook e-books are 50% off today only. (And, needless to say, they’re multiformat and DRM-free.) Enter the coupon code DRMFREE at the checkout to take advantage of this opportunity. No matter your feelings about DRM, that’s quite a good price for what O’Reilly has to offer. If they have any e-books you’ve been thinking about getting, this would be a good time....

May 4 is Day Against DRM.  I received the following email from No Starch Press: I'm writing to let you know that we're super excited about Day Against DRM and we're joining the effort by making all ebooks on our website 50% off on May 4th. We've always offered DRM-free ebooks on our site. We trust our readers and we believe that electronic books should have the same reader rights as printed books.  If anyone else is offering a special in celebration post it in the comments and then I'll move the whole post to the top of the page on May...

On blog e-Learning Stuff, an unidentified blogger writes about a recent conference he or she attended at which discussion was had of the “Kindle Problem”—the Kindle is the most popular e-book platform, but not all e-book platforms and formats are compatible with the Kindle. And thus, there was a problem “with the Kindle.” The blogger points out: Blaming the user is indicative of an industry that fails to understand its users and is an industry that dictates how users should do things, over trying to meet the needs of the user. The...

In what must be some of the least surprising news ever, one day after Tor’s US imprint, Tor/Forge, announced it was going DRM-free by July, Tor UK has just made the same announcement. It’s pretty clear they were planning this all along; I expect the reason they staggered them was to try to get two separate news bumps from it. At any rate, this should at least satisfy the folks asking about it in the comments thread on Charlie Stross’s blog post yesterday....

Yesterday was a day for reactions to the Tor DRM-free announcement, for sure. John Scalzi has a post in which he applauds the move, while featuring a quote from Patrick Nielsen Hayden in which pnh indicates that Tor will in no way be scaling back its efforts to fight piracy just because it’s dropping DRM. Scalzi feels this is a victory for people who “just want to own their damn books” and suspects that other publishing houses will be following suit. Charlie Stross has another lengthy post to his blog, following up on his post last week about Amazon’s...

In Mike Shatzkin’s latest essay about publishing, collecting his insights about this year’s London Book Fair, an interesting paragraph leaps out at me. Shatzkin was talking to Pottermore CEO Charlie Redmayne about the DRM-free release of the Harry Potter books, and reports being startled by what Redmayne had to say about Potter piracy: Apparently, Potter ebook files started showing up on file-sharing sites pretty much right away after they opened. But before they could serve any takedown notices, Charlie says the community of sharers reacted. They said “C’mon now. Here we have a publisher doing what...

Well, that didn’t take very long. The first major publishing imprint has announced it is going to go entirely DRM-free. Tor/Forge has just posted a press announcement to Tor.com that its entire list of e-books will be available DRM-free, both through the current vendors and through retailers that can only sell DRM-free e-books, by July 2012. “Our authors and readers have been asking for this for a long time,” said president and publisher Tom Doherty. “They’re a technically sophisticated bunch, and DRM is a constant annoyance to them. It prevents them from using legitimately-purchased e-books in...