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By Chris Meadows

Eric FlintI first noticed these columns when Slashdot pointed out the most recent one (albeit with an incorrect writeup claiming Flint said “DRM causes piracy.” But then, that’s about par for the course for Slashdot “journalism”), but I had been familiar with Flint’s writings about so-called “piracy” from the days of his “Prime Palavers” back when the Baen Free Library and Webscriptions first started up. Happily, the years since then have only given Flint time to expand upon and develop his themes, and all six columns are well worth reading. The first three are an examination of copyright and term length, the fourth looks at the principle of Fair Use, and the fifth and sixth focus more closely on DRM.

In the sixth editorial in Flint’s column entitled “Salvos Against Big Brother,” Flint expounds upon the thesis that, by creating conditions of scarcity and inconvenience, DRM provides added incentive to otherwise honest people to download material illicitly. He points to the seven years that his first novel, Mother of Demons, has been available freely from Baen without damaging print sales, and arguably promoting them.

Embiid and Liaden

And although I doubt he was meaning to refer specifically to Sharon Lee and Steve Miller’s Liaden Universe novels, when Flint writes,

A DRM-crippled text is a royal pain in the ass for legitimate customers. First of all, because you have to have the right software (and often hardware) to use Product A as opposed to Product B—since the publishing and software industries can’t agree on a common standard. And, secondly, because you have absolutely no guarantee that next year those same industries won’t make the software you purchased from them obsolete and thereby make the books you bought unreadable.

it’s hard not to remember their cautionary example. The Liaden ebooks were originally available exclusively through the small ebook publisher Embiid, and books using Embiid’s proprietary encryption format could only be read in special programs available for PalmOS and Windows. Text could not be selected and copied, and requests in Embiid’s SFFnet newsgroup for reader clients for other platforms, such as Windows CE, or other programs like Microsoft Reader, were generally met with a virtual throwing-up of hands and “we can’t afford the license fees.”

And then, of course, Embiid went out of business, giving customers a window of a few months in which to download and archive all their Embiid books and the reader software for same before going offline for good—a warning to us all about the hazards of DRM-restricted material. Fortunately, the story has a happy ending, at least for Lee and Miller—their Liaden Universe books migrated to Baen Webscriptions, where the first five are now available for purchase in open formats with no DRM whatsoever.

Links to Flint’s columns

Here are links to all six columns to date. Despite the header text claiming only 1/3 to 1/2 of the stories are available, the essays are presented in their entirety.

  1. A Matter of Principle
  2. Copyright: What Are the Proper Terms for the Debate?
  3. Copyright: How Long Should It Be?
  4. What is Fair Use
  5. Lies, and More Lies
  6. There Ain’t No Such Thing as a Free Lunch
 
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