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Adobe’s Bill McCoy on e-book DRM: The ‘least worst solution’
November 24, 2008 | 11:15 am
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By David Rothman
Here is an excerpt from Adobe e-booker Bill McCoy‘s new post in his DRM debate with library tech guru Peter Brantley:
Now, let me say up front that I don’t think ebook DRM is "good good good" any more than I think that of taxation, standing armies, or the proliferation of nuclear technology. But although one may dislike taxation, one may dislike even more the likely consequences of eliminating taxes (diminished schools, roads, law enforcement, …). Peter’s post focused on negative attributes of DRM in isolation. But to me, the important thing is to look at likely outcomes given various scenarios, and to consider what these outcomes would mean for the principal actors involved (authors, publishers, and readers). Not whether something is good or bad but whether it’s better or worse than the likely alternative.
To me, it’s pretty clear that the establishment by the industry of a broadly adopted cross-platform ebook DRM system should lead to a significantly better outcome for all concerned than if no such platform ends up getting established. "DRM" is a somewhat loaded term: to clarify, by "ebook DRM" I mean a relatively lightweight means of limiting and/or discouraging copying and use beyond publisher-permitted limits, intended more to "keep honest people honest" than to totally prevent copying. After all, a book can be scanned and digitized, or even re-keyed, with only a middling level of difficulty — so aiming for "ironclad" DRM is not warranted, even if it were feasible.
Your thoughts?
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Comments:
I believe this post shows how corrupted the view of information has become in the minds of publishers (and Adobe for that matter). Lets break it down a little. I will paraphrase different parts of Mr. McCoy’s arguments and then respond to them.
1. To keep honest people honest. Frankly this position is insulting to the public. If we are honest, then we should trusted. Trying to force us to be honest basically suggests that people are not honest and no amount of rhetoric changes the fact. You either take an honest person at their word or you don’t really consider them honest.
2. Discourage use beyone publisher-permitted limits. This represents a fundamental misunderstanding of what copyright is about. The publisher does not have carte-blanch to limit the use of their work. Rather copyright provides the author (and by extension the publisher) with a legal tool to prevent non-fair use of the material. The distinction while subtle is important. As the current implementation of DRM shows, it is being used to limit reasonable fair use activity. Publishers should not be able to limit the device or the format in which a book is read.
Ultimately, it is my belief that DRM ultimately serves the purpose of restricting fair use at the expense of the reader. It will force honest users to become criminals just to exercise their natural rights.
While I don’t implement DRM at BooksForABuck.com, I recognize that doing so comes at a distinct cost–some of my titles are pirated, generating no return for me or my authors. The reasons I’ve avoided DRM are three-fold. First, DRM schemes are expensive. Second, DRM has significant (non-monetary) costs to the reader that diminish the perceived value of the work being purchased. Third, I offer my books at a quite low price, eliminating many of the semi-plausible excuses some people make for pirating eBooks.
That said, I think an industry-wide DRM scheme, one that was built on a standards-based eBook format (ePub) that would eliminate the lock-in to specific machines common in today’s DRM schemes, and one that included some form of vaulting, allowing customers to continue reading their purchased books even if the publisher or distributor originally responsible for the delivery of the eBook exited the business, could be devised and might be a better solution than no DRM–and certainly would be a better solution than today’s DRM.
I think Bill’s point is dead-on. We can’t compare today’s DRM with some idealized non-DRM system where nobody pirated.
It’s painfully hard to make money in this business, but the chance to make money (even though making money is rare) drives many people to struggle with their words, their ideas, and come up with great fiction.
Ideally, DRM would be like the lock on the door to your neighborhood shop–enough to deter most criminals, yet not so obtrusive to make shopping difficult, either. We aren’t there yet–and it’s possible that there is no such solution. But it’s also possible that a friendly DRM approach could be devised.
Rob Preece
Publisher, http://www.BooksForABuck.com
With respect to Mr. Preece, I must disagree with the rational for DRM.
1. Current DRM schemes, no matter how draconian, have not stopped pirates. Beyond the fact that it does not stop serious pirates (i.e., those who plan to make money from their piracy or those who are putting books up on Darknet), it does not pose a serious impediment to those who want to strip DRM for their own purposes. A recent poll on mobileread (which I started) showed that about half of all mobileread participants stripped DRM from the works they bought.
2. Which of course brings us to why they are stripping DRM. Any DRM (as opposed to social DRM) restricts fair use rights. The two methods in common practice either ties you to a machine or set of machines (i.e., you need a device id to decode the book) or it uses a user pin to decode the book. Either way, it limits basic fair use aspects of books, such as lending them to friends (not to mention, it makes it harder to buy books as gifts for people).
Ultimately, the concept of reader friendly DRM is, until proven otherwise, a myth. I fear that the publishing world continues to ignore the lessons made by other media with respect to the internet. Developing schemes to limit the use of media by users always results in users going to the darknet. When users feel that the publishers are price gouging, or limiting reasonable use of the media that is purchased through normal channels, they feel justified in bypassing the publishers.
Ultimately Mr. Preece already has the exact model that the Publishing industry needs to adopt. Low prices on open books, along with an easy to use and universal system to read and buy books will do far more to discourage pirating than any DRM scheme ever could.
Bill,
You may be right. I think, though, that it’s a useful exercise to define what a DRM system should have in order to be effective rather than attack all DRM (since we haven’t seen all DRM). Here’s my list (but I welcome changes).
1. Should ensure portability. If I buy a different, incompatible device, I keep my books.
2. Should include survivability. If my retailer shuts down, I keep my books.
3. Should be cheap.
4. Should be failure-proof (if I forget my password, I should still be able to read my books).
5. Should be relatively difficult to decrypt without the key (no point in DRM if any high schooler can break it in five minutes).
I’m sure there are others, but defining requirements and determining whether a proposed solution meets them is a time-honored approach to development.
And thank you for your kind words on our current business model. BooksForABuck.com has no plans on implementing DRM–I simply don’t believe it’s in anyone’s interest to religiously argue that all DRM must be evil.
Rob Preece
Publisher, http://www.BooksForABuck.com
> 5. Should be relatively difficult to decrypt without the key (no point in DRM if any high schooler can break it in five minutes).
No small vulnerability, Rob. Especially if there’s a “standard” DRM, hackers will take up the challenge. Now what happens if publishers have built their biz models around the “standard”? And then there’s the continued threat of scans from paper copies.
Like Bill, I think you’ve got a terrific approach now at BooksForABuck. That is, no DRM!
Thanks,
David
Rob,
The basic problem with your defined ideal DRM is that item 1 is problematic and item 5 is essentially impossible.
I will take them one at a time.
I agree that any electronic book should allow portability, but this portability must include not only other devices but also other formats. Who knows, regardless of the standards adopted in 2008 what the standards will be in 2028. Format shifting is a fundamental example of fair use, therefore a method must be available to allow users to shift into any reasonable format (including ASCII if that is their choice). Further, portability should not require that the user give up privacy in the process which is done when one has to register a book reading device.
As David pointed out, item 5 is the real challenge! Further I am going to state that it is essentially impossible. Any DRM scheme developed, has to allow the user access to two basic pieces of information, the decryption key and the plain text of the book (since they will be able to read the book on their reader). If you ever take a class on cryptography, you will see that this is the holy grail of breaking cryptographic systems. Ultimately you leave no secret that cannot be reversed engineered by a hacker.
Ultimately proponents of DRM have forgotten a basic tenant of warfare; it is always cheaper to devise a method to penetrate a set of defenses than it is to build the defenses in the first place.
As far as I am concerned, the publishers would get a far better return on their anti-piracy dollar by attacking the darknet than by protecting themselves against the average consumer.
I can only weigh in here as a reader — purely on the consumer side of the DRM issue.
I hate DRM. Oh, yes, and I hate Adobe with the flaming passion of a thousand burning suns. I hate them, the company, the programmers, the asses at the helpdesk, and the CEOs who drive the decisions. And here is why:
I bought a couple of dozen “secure Adobe eBooks”, to carry on my laptop. Some of these were expensive technical texts. The idea was that I could have them with me when I travel, since carrying that many books would simply be impossible. Elegant solution, yes? Well, no. I paid out a lot of money for these, too.
Having bought them honestly, and registered them honestly, and used them honestly — my laptop died. The HD died, and there was no choice — I HAD to replace the HD. But I hadn’t been careless — I had taken disk image backups, and had everything on backup. So just restore the image, and all will be hunky-dory….Hah. No. Restore the image, and according to Adobe I am now on a new computer, and I can’t read the eBooks. I try to re-register them. I can’t. I spend ££££ calling Adobe’s helpdesk, and after being passed around and around and around various people in India with dubious English and dubious technical knowledge, I am told that I have to have my “old laptop” available, to confirm the re-registration of the “new laptop”. Great, thanks — and just how am I supposed to do that? After explaining about 6x to various people why this is impossible, I finally get someone who says, “download this code, it will reset the Adobe DRM, then you can register the eBooks as new, and access them again.” Except that, of course, it didn’t work.
So I called Adobe, again, at even more expense, and told them this. And the response? “Contact the vendor that sold you the eBooks, and see if you can get new copies. We can’t help you.”
It had been over a year since I bought those eBooks, and I had bought them from different places. I could not get them again from Amazon without paying for them again, which I wasn’t prepared to do. Fortunately, the other vendors I had dealt with were more helpful, and allowed me to download them again free. So, I only lost 4 of my books.
Then Adobe “upgraded” their reader. Unwarily, I allowed the software to install the upgrade — and guess what, now I couldn’t open my eBooks again! According to the error message, I was on a different machine! And rolling back the upgrade DID NOT FIX IT.
Yeah, all that rigamarole with the badly-misnamed Adobe “help” desk…play it again, Sam.
This time, I emailed various levels of Adobe “technical help” saying, basically, “I cannot possibly be the only person in the world this has happened to, and your downloaded code to ‘reset’ the Adobe DRM doesn’t work. Please advise a real solution.” And this time, I actually got an email back from Adobe “technical help” saying, in so many words, that they were not in any way responsible for ensuring that I had continued access to DRM-protected eBooks, since the eBooks themselves were not Adobe’s own products — and basically, I should go talk to the person who sold me the eBooks, since maybe they would care. Adobe technical didn’t.
WTF??????!
By this point, one of the vendors from whom I had bought some of my eBooks had gone out of business or otherwise disappeared, so that is another 2 of my eBooks inaccessible forever. Fortunately the other vendor was Fictionwise, and may blessings rain down upon him (but not too hard), he reset my account so that I could re-download those texts again. There is nothing else that a vendor can possibly do to “fix” this problem.
A few months after that, I had to load Service Pack 2 onto my laptop, because I needed some .NET functionality. Hey presto…it broke the DRM, which ONCE AGAIN thinks I have a new machine.
I called Adobe — once. I explained, civilly, and in detail, what had happened. I got pointed to a solution which, once again, didn’t work. I have not gone back to them. I have not even downloaded the texts again. They are rotting in an inaccessible form of kludged-up bits on a corner of the SAME hard drive….
And let me tell you, Preece, McCoy, and whoever else is on the publishing side — I am no longer even vaguely interested in being a legal customer of something DRM protected. Trying to be an honest customer has gotten me nothing but too much damn wasted money, too much damn wasted time, complete and utter indifference from the one company who could make the software functional, and the frustration of having books that I want, that I have legally paid for, WHICH I CANNOT READ.
As soon as I have a little time to spend, I am going to master whatever programming skills are needed, and I am, in fact, going to break the damn DRM — I want my books back. In the mean time, I will ONLY ever buy pirated, DRM-removed texts on those rare occasions where I need to have an eBook at all. I will never voluntarily give anyone any of my money where they can — and from my experience, WILL — later deny me the use of what I have legally purchased, and not give a damn.
I did not start out hating your industry — I just ended up that way.
DRM — and the people who made it into the consumer nightmare that it is — can rot in Hell.
I can understand Authors need to ensure they are paid for their work and about copyright for commercial purposes.
With DRM Adobe has taken the music industries stance they took in the 90′s and early 00′s. Trying to lockup everything down with a DRM system.
Well the Music industry failed and still fails against Piracy. The major change was nothing to do with the Music industry but a company ‘Apple’ seeing an opportunty where they made it easier for the user to get access to the Music they wanted via the iPOD/iTunes system for a price that was more than acceptable. Guess what people preferred to be able to by their music legally, this has however dented the middle mens profits who where inflating prices in the first place that lead to Piracy.
The above describes what companies like Adobe and the Music industry think of the consumer. That they are inherently dishonest and will steal them blind. Where as the story above also points out that the consumer would actually prefer to purchase and pay legally for the rights to use copyrighted materials.
Adobe’s DRM that they have currently designed is done in such a way that even consumers who have legally purchased ebooks will be treated like criminals. The DRM is designed not to actually allow you to properly restore from backups. If you actually have an event, say a Hard drive crashes, forget it.
This highlights the inheirent flaw in the DRM model, yes it is good to ensure the owner of their works gets paid for use. But implementing a DRM system does not guarentee this. Adobes previous DRM implmentation has already had one company (russian) who created a decryption software so you could backup your ebooks, who they pursued with vigor to get this software off the market.
I believe the consumer has the right to backup their legally purchase rights, however that is not what Adobe believe through their actions.
If you have a PC failure of some kind that requires you to rebuild you machine, I suggest you try to restore your legally purchased books. It does not matter even if you register correctly your Adobe Libary etc to make sure you have the same registration as what you purchased your ebooks under it will not work.
And asking Adobe support for help will just further entrench this position in your mind are either they are unable to help or are inept.
If you still do not believe me google for people asking for help in restoring their Adobe ebooks from backups.
Poor DRM implementations fail, where the consumer is not considered or their experience is ignored they fail. Adobe is banking on the latest push for ebook readers. ie Sony’s ereader, kindle or lets say the Nook or somthing else.
But manufactures are moving to open their eReaders to be able to use ebooks in multiple formats. Sony’s eReader and the Kindle are stuck with Adobes DRM but as eReaders are relatively new considering and ebooks have had a terrible time getting traction either Adobe fixes their DRM or they will dump out of the market.
While Adobe argue for a cross platform DRM, there is no guarantee that it will be theirs no matter how much they think it will be. They are banking on the concept that if they get their DRM format every where they will be the VHS format as apposed to the BetaMax format. Guess what Adobe marketing guys/girls the consumer has moved on from that and if you do not allow it to be easy for them in their experience you just going to crash and burn.