Robert Weber, a consultant on DRM matters, concedes that the Digital Consumers’ Rights Act of 2005 should require labeling of DRMed CDs. Good idea! I’d certainly welcome this for e-books. Alas, he does not want the DMCA changed to allow for fair use such as backups.
Hey, come on, Bob. In my case alone the vendors of e-books have lost hundreds of dollars over the years and perhaps even thousands. I’m anti-piracy. I just try not to buy the damn things without the ability to make reliable backups for personal use. Proprietary formats are scary enough for those wishing to own e-books for real. The last thing in the world we need is Big Bro telling us we can’t circumvent DRM even to make backups. Most consumers aren’t as aware of those issues as I am, but in their guts they understand how ephemeral e-books are, especially with here-today-gone-tomorrow proprietary formats. No wonder that e-books–to use the words of IDPF director Nick Bogaty–appeal just to “enthusiasts”! As Nick acknowledges, sales are indeed “miniscule.” Here in the states they’re in the tens of millions, just a speck of the many billions spent on p-books, and today’s DRM is no small reason for this. The Harry Potter farce, where the publishers used the ultimate DRM, no e-book edition, shows the absurb logic of DRM zealots. What’s the point when paper copies can be scanned a la Potter? I can see a “DRM Lite” (with liberal backup “privileges”) in use to keep honest people honest, but not the consumer-hostile varieties. DRM overkill, not piracy, is the real problem confronting major publishers, who, however, will suffer more losses to pirates if they avoid e-books or use DRM to subtract value from legitimate editions.
If we’re going to have DRM, at least do it right. Allow customers to be able to make their own backups and also retrieve backups from a central database. Legally and technically we need both features for maximum protection for consumers. As I said, the cause of absolute protection for content providers is hopeless, given the existence of OCRing of paper editions, so we might as well value consumer convenience over absolute bullet-proofing.
What’s more–this is a similar but not the same issue–consumers should be able to download updated formats for free for newer machines, when they upgrade. You don’t have to keep buying copies of paper books again and again in different formats. Same concept should apply to the e-variety. I hope that Bob and other DRM boosters will show sensivity to those questions if they indeed see e-books as a serious medium.
Standardization of a core e-book format and DRM could help, of course, in achieving the above goal and others.. OpenReader, anyone? Meanwhile I hope that a reasonable guy like Bob, especially post-Potter farce, will reconsider his opposition to fair-use rights.
Related: Australian court rules against Kazaa, from Bob Weber’s blog.
Please, please, please…
speaking of DRM give the message that those system manage (digital or digitaly, I don’t really know) rights.
But this is false. Where are the right of the public. Where is the automatic public domain attribution of the work after the end of the legal protection, where are the differents rights for differents locals,how can the buyer resale the work (first sale doctrine…) ?????
It is not DRM, it is Customers Rights Removal.
Exactly! People will buy DRMed e-books but prefer to patronize good publishers without Draconian restrictions. I think that in the interest of compromise with the content providers, DRM should be an option and carried out in good faith. But in the end, as I see it, the marketplace will speak. As Roger Sperberg and others have noted, DRM takes away value from a customer’s perspective! It is no small reason why e-book sales are in the toilet. I think that publishers and software companies will fare better if relieved if this burden.
I’ve stopped buying e-books. Horrible DRM means that I have practically no way of transferring their contents to my REB. So it is either paper books or pirated e-books for me.