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Michael Crichton example shows futility of Draconian DRM
January 3, 2006 | 6:41 am
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By David Rothman
While the DRM debate rages in e-bookdom, pirates go about their business as usual–probably working mostly from OCRs of best-selling paper books.
The latest victim (and yes people can be victims even if they’re multimillionaires) is Michael Crichton. A piracy-friendly site links to collection of a dozen Crichton best-sellers, everything from Jurassic Park to the Lost World. The apparently German-based pirates are making money by giving download priorities to paying customers. It’s pure theft, no doubt about it. The pirates might as well be selling the copies outright. With the virus threat in mind, I won’t sample the wares, but the operation indeed looks like the real thing. This is the stuff of publishers’ nightmares, and if my hunch is correct about the origins of the pirated works, all the DRM in the world isn’t going to end the rip-offs. Among the books pirated is Congo. At Fictionwise, eBooks.com and Amazon.com, I could find no e-book edition.
Here’s the great Catch-22 of DRM. Pirates won’t really mess with the obscure books. And the best-sellers? The pirates if need be will simply OCR paper copies, often working in teams as they did with the Harry Potter book. See the futility of the Draconian approach?
Although OpenReader aims to offer a gentle but robust version of DRM for publishers wanting it, we can think of much better ways to reduce piracy. Way #1: Make legit copies available easily and inexpensively, and, with appropriate books, use innovative technology to expand the range of business models. OpenReader, for example, will offer shared annotations, a service for which book buyers could pay in some cases if they wanted updates. We’re going to help publishers offer so many trimming that it will be too bloody inconvenient for pirates to be able to replicate the whole collection of legitimate products and services.
Piracy will always go on, but we believe that if publishers treat customers well and adjust business models, book publishing can remain a viable business. The real issue, by the way, is not how much money publishers will lose to pirates. Rather, the issue is long-term profits. We’ll do our best help publishers protect and grow them.
Detail: Found on the same site: O’Reilly’s Webmaster in a Nutshell.
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Comments:
I disagree with the assertion “Pirates won’t really mess with the obscure books.” They won’t if it means OCR but one of the reasons Napster’s defenders said it was important was that you could easily get at lots of obscure stuff that you couldn’t get in your local record store. If ebooks were just as easy as MP3s to copy there’s no reason they wouldn’t be shared just as promiscuously at both ends of the “long tail”. Whether this would be a good thing or not and what the harm would be, however, is another story.
Well, as noted, piracy will always be a problem, but it will be less so with obscure books. Furthermore, although I’ll not brook piracy let me note that there are promotional benefits when obscure books get spread around. Remember, the real goal for publishers–not to reduce piracy losses to $0, but rather to grow profits. You’re welcome to disagree. Tha’s just my take based on what I’ve read and observed. Thanks for your thoughts, David, and happy New Year. David
Or the publishers, backed by the muscle of their conglomerate CEOs, could just begin publishing all books with special watermarks on every page. Then pass laws that require all scanners to incorporate DRM chips that would read these watermarks, in which would be copying/scanning privileges, so as to make their books unable to be copied or scanned.
“Broadcast flag” for print.
I imagine they have already thought of it. I hope the day never comes.
The pirates wouldn’t care–they’d just do hacks to get around the DRM chips. Besides, many are in countries without the same fixation on copyright laws. – D
Non-starter. You’d also have to require every megapixel camera to have that built in. And force inclusion of DRM into OCR software–and also into any image processing program that could remove the DRM watermark. I don’t see the GIMP having compulsory DRM any time soon….
As noted in many places, nearly all pirated ebooks are derived from print books, so it will be futile to try to stop this piracy by continuing to add TPM restrictions to all sorts of devices that could be used to crack digital versions.
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