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Does anybody know? To DRM or not to DRM
March 18, 2010 | 12:15 am
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By Chris Meadows
I am a specialist author of business books who self-publishes. I sell direct yet with 2 million copies sold in 20 languages I would say I am good at what I do. I have not sold on Amazon. I am going to launch digitally through Amazon and through my own new webstore. My target industry is very networked and the chances of people forwarding an ebook like mine is very likely. Thus I have not sold digitally thus far. Yet my industry is not technically competent. So I am not too concerned about people ‘unlocking’ DRM individually UNLESS someone unlocks then forwards. I think many people would have ethical reasons with forwarding if the titles had ‘do not forward as this is stealing…’ What are your views? 
A reader, Edward, posted this as a comment, and it seemed like a good question to pose as a “Does Anybody Know” column.
I have not sold digitally.
I own my rights [except in some foreign languages.]
On my site, DRM or NOT?
Strong DRM or simple?
My own advice would be to forego the DRM. It just adds extra cost, and makes it harder for your customers to read your books on the platforms of their choosing. But you should listen to what others say and make up your own mind.
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Comments:
How about going the no-DRM route, and somewhere in the beginning, write a message like “If you received this book from a friend without buying it yourself, and found it helpful, please support the author by donating the cost of the book or purchase at (your website).”
You could also add some non-accusing information about how, even though it’s “just data”, ebooks should be purchased like real books. Perhaps if you have the technical ability, add in some ‘social DRM’ for customers ( “This ebook was purchased by ____.”).
I don’t know if this “honor system” works, but I find DRM not only annoying, but indicative that a publisher or author thinks his readers are dishonest. Besides, DRM doesn’t stop piracy; it’s just more of a pain for your honest customers.
I would recommend Social DRM at the most. J.K. Rowling has never sold her books online but they can easily be found if one looks. So DRM just punishes those who actually buy your book. I saw a funny comic strip a while back that pointed out that there are dozens of ways to lose access to your legally bought ebooks. But if you pirate them they are yours forever. so do your fans/customers a favor and go light to none at all for your books. The biggest issue I could see is that while Amazon has a huge reach, you may be stuck with their DRM options.
>I think many people would have ethical reasons with forwarding if the titles had ‘do not forward as this is stealing…’
Except, it’s not stealing. It is a copyright infringement. So that solution will only work on “stupid” people. And they are not the ones to fear here.
Social DRM is sort of a solution. Still easily brekable if you know what you are doing. So at best this will just delay the inevitable.
And, as mentioned above, Rowling is a great case in point. I guess you could say she was pulled kicking and screaming into this millennium BY HER CUSTOMERS. And because she refused ebooks she made exactly squat on ebook sales. Do you see how se got the WORST of both worlds.
I would consider having the users register on you website so they can receive updates and sell direct. If they are business books I’m assuming there is a need to update the content or make small fixes.
Just one question. Why can you purchase a book, read it and (a)throw it away; (b)give it to the spouse or a friend; (c)donate it to the library; (d)sell it online as a used book or at a garage sale but you cannot share an ebook that you purchased?
@Fred: An e-book isn’t physical media. You can’t expect to do with it everything you’d do with physical media, any more than you can expect to be able to hand a TV actor a bouquet, through the TV screen, after their performance is over.
It’s time for all of us to get used to the differences between physical and digital products, and stop trying to force digital products to be physical products.
Bravo, Steve! Do all of the anti-DRM posters work for free? You buy the right to read an ebook, not the right to duplicate it.
Linda: Straw man. DRM doesn’t prevent clever people from duplicating anything, and it only takes one clever person to put your DRM-locked product on peer-to-peer, thus bypassing the putative benefits of DRM altogether. (Furthermore, as Harry Potter demonstrates, people will quite happily scan and OCR printed books, thus bypassing the DRM issue altogether.)
It prevents not-so-clever people from copying, true, but it can also prevent them from reading the book on their preferred devices. DRM-locked Mobipocket books still cannot be read on an iPhone without breaking it, nor can Kindle books be read on devices for which there is not yet a Kindle reader.
Why pay extra to license DRM given that DRM is 1) ineffective and 2) consumer-unfriendly? Put the money into publishing more books instead.
I would almost suggest that you put DRM on the Amazon edition, and sell through your own site without DRM. This would honor your enforced commitment to Amazon to sell at no lower price, while adding value to the editions you sell at your own site (I’m presuming you get a larger return on ebooks you sell yourself).
Since Kindle is its own closed garden, the DRM probably doesn’t hurt very much, now there are Kindle readers on other platforms.
But that’s only a suggestion — I don’t know if anybody has gone down that road, and what their results have been.
— asotir
Linda, anti-DRM does not mean pro-piracy. Rather we generally believe that DRM essentially restricts our fair use rights of the media that we are buying. For example, lets say I had bought a book for a Sony Reader using their old format and DRM. Now, my Reader breaks and I want to replace it with a Kindle… the DRM prevents me from reading the book on the Kindle. Without the DRM, I can use a tool like Calibre to convert the book into a compatible format.
Steve, I would point out that its not simply a question of wanting to use an e-book like a paper book. All the things Fred wants to do are perfectly possible (easier in fact) with electronic files. Essentially, we need to develop a new paradigm in publishing to ensure that authors continue to get compensated for their work. You can be sure that DRM or not, people are going to continue sharing electronic media.
Actually, we can’t be sure of that. That’s a given in the present, but not in the future.
Once we were “sure” that people wouldn’t stand to pay for TV. (I could do a half-dozen of these, but I’ll refrain for the sake of brevity.) But things change, depending on technology, legality, profitability and practicality… and suddenly, the things we were so “sure” of don’t apply anymore.
The reality is, we do not know how international law, corporate greed, or individual desires could change the web, or alter or remove some of the digital file options we currently enjoy. In this money-dominated world, the likelihood that the web will never find a way to protect their products from theft are paper-thin… perhaps electron-thin. Workable security is the only thing preventing corporations from accomplishing that. But combinations of technology, law, enforcement and public incentive to buy-in can potentially overcome all of those obstacles.
The cable industry combined transmission technology with set-top boxes (which provide coded access security), convinced governments to secure their property so that you couldn’t run your own cable to all of your friends’ houses, created hefty fines and loss of service if you did so, and gave the incentive of 100 channels (instead of 3 or 4) if you play ball. Right now, they can (and often do) track what people are watching, when and where, and sell that info to telemarketers, surveyers and TV studios. But instead of marching on your local cable office with torches and pitchforks, you hit the Pay-Per-View button to watch the latest wrestling match.
Think that can’t happen with literally everything on the web?
I’ll say it again: DRM doesn’t work now, but only because it’s only one part of a system that is required to make it work, and which doesn’t exist. But it could. Digital security is possible, if the right entities decide it’s in their best interests to get it right… and no amount of whining by the public will stop that. In fact, if they do it right, the public will be cheering and queueing up to pay for it. Don’t believe it? Ask a cable TV subscriber.
Steve,
I’m a little confused as to what you’re getting at. I don’t think anyone is denying that people will pay money for reasonable content delivered reasonably. But I don’t think your example shows what you want it to. After all, most of the films and TV shows shown on Cable TV (if they’re any good) are readily available – should you care to pirate – within hours of being shown. The only thing that’s really being ‘protected’ is live content, and that’s more due to it being pretty much worthless after the event’s over, than any sort of content control.
“Think that can’t happen with literally everything on the web?”
Short answer: Yes. It can’t happen (And if it did, it wouldn’t stop illegal copying).
And from your previous comment:
“It’s time for all of us to get used to the differences between physical and digital products, and stop trying to force digital products to be physical products.”
Fair enough. But you fall into this trap yourself: referring to ‘theft’ of digital items rather than the accurate ‘copyright violation’, for example.
Stuart, the last paragraph there is just a matter of semantics. “Illegally obtaining something without paying for it as required by law” is theft, whether the product is physical or digital.
(I won’t get into a lengthy debate over the rest of it, we’ve been there before…)
Steve,
At least in English law:
“A person is guilty of theft, if he dishonestly appropriates property belonging to another with the intention of permanently depriving the other of it”
So theft involves two things: acquiring something illegally and depriving someone else. The second part is integral to it being ‘theft’. So, no. Copyright violation may be wrong, evil, immoral, illegal, etc. But it is not theft.
Stuart, that’s still arguing semantics in order to dodge an issue.
Steve,
Which issue, exactly, am I dodging? And yes: it _is_ arguing semantics (which means, according to Wikipedia, “the study of meaning, usually in language”). Theft applies to rivalrous goods. Illegally copying something is not theft. Piracy, copyright infringement and/or violation? Yes. Theft? No.
Stuart, what you (and many others) are doing is seeking a word that will suggest in its meaning that it is essentially make it OK to take a product without having to pay the creator for it. That is the issue being dodged: The right of a creator to be compensated for their creation.
In fact, if a word could be found that would suggest that creators were duty-bound to society to create work for no compensation, you can bet that’s the word that would be used.
Steve,
Have you every actually taken a class or read a book on cryptography?
Your analogy with TV is fundamentally flawed for the following reasons.
1. Cable companies deliver a service, not a specific product (though in practice, the service delivers the product). That service requires a physical connection with their infrastructure.
2. They might be able to stop you from stealing the service, but they have yet found a way to prevent people from recording the programming that their service delivers and then redistributing the product.
3. They convinced people to pay money for the service because they offered a service that was not available for free (At least before the conversion to digital, most people did not get cable to simply get better major network reception).
4. Because they control all aspects of the service (i.e., whats available, how its delivered, how its protected) cable companies are operating inside a closed network where they can control all aspects of the network.
In contrast each ebook is a discrete product. The internet is a much more open environment and will remain so even if Net Neutrality is not properly maintained. Individuals can communicate with each other using strong encryption methods that make it essentially impossible for a third party to decrypt their messages.
A much better analogy here is software and music. Its been 11 years since Napstar got started and while its been shutdown, music sharing has not stopped, or even been slowed. Its been close to 30 years since the Apple II and the Commodore 64 made computers affordable to home users, and almost as soon as software was available for them, it was copied and distributed illegally and yet despite the efforts of software companies, its still being distributed illegally. Mind you, if the people who write software can’t figure out how to protect their own product, how are the publishers of e-books going to do it?
The basic problem with DRM is as follows. It is essentially a cryptographic system where the attacker has access to the plain text and the decryption key. All that is needed at that point is to figure out how to use the key to decrypt. Its essentially like being given the numbers 3 4 = 7 and having to figure out what operation is being used. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out its addition.
Ultimately, the sort of changes that are necessary to make DRM possible would essentially be to make the internet look like Cable… content providers would have to provide your computer (and not let you load any third party programs or write any yourself), cryptography would have to be banned (say goodbye to online shopping), and the owners of the computer would have to give up even the illusion of privacy. In other words, the only effective way of stopping DRM is to embrace Big Brother.
Ah, the inevitable “Big Brother” invocation… at which point, I walk away from the conversation entirely.
Steve,
It’s a shame you’re not contributing to this post any more, because you’re last post – to me – is… a bit odd? I’ve never suggested that authors – and other content creators – should not be compensated. Indeed, I would hope that they are, for the pure and simple reason that I want them to create more.
The fact that I want the correct term used – copyright infringement/violation, or piracy (rather than that for the completely different offense of theft) is because I want a sensible debate. That means specifying exactly what the costs and benefits of each option is, which you can’t do if you twist the reference of the discussion by distorting, to breaking point, the language used.
The description of an activity you dislike in the worse possible terms (For ex, animal rights activists with “Meat is Murder”) may well make for a good political rallying cry. It has no place in intelligent debate, however.