0

By Chris Meadows

Hardly news to the rest of us, I know, but Ars Technica has a great piece looking at a study by a Cambridge law professor. Patricia Akester spent several years conducting many interviews with people who have been affected by DRM and anticircumvention laws.

Akester concludes that

Although DRM has not impacted on many acts permitted by law, certain permitted acts are being adversely affected by the use of DRM […] in spite of the existence of technological solutions […] to accommodate those permitted acts.

As the head of a British advocacy group pointed out, DRM often prevents blind people from using text-to-speech software on e-books, even when otherwise permitted by law. One Amazon customer, Lynn Holdsworth, ended up downloading an illicit copy of the Holy Bible, of all books, because Amazon and the publisher pointed fingers at each other over who owed a refund for the e-book she could not use.

Holdsworth noted that "it is not always possible to resort to non-digital [books] because of their size. She supplied an example: the standard version of Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince contains about 600 pages, the large print version is only slightly bigger (at 998 pages), but the Braille version actually entails ten large volumes of text."

One of the specialists Akester interviewed, an expert digital archivist, also pointed out another conundrum that I have often mentioned here: in order for digital works to be archived, the DRM on them must be bypassed—which can be done easily. “[For] all the time and money spent on trying to protect optical discs, software workarounds are cheap, abundant and fairly reliable.” And, of course, the same holds true for e-books.

Those who promulgate DRM insist that these are “edge cases” and only affect a small number of consumers. But on the other hand, even leaving aside the Tower of E-Babel and professors who don’t want to have to camcord video excerpts, how many people now own video-capable “normal” iPods, iPod Touches, or iPhones and would like to copy their DVDs to them just as easily as they copy their compact discs? That’s an awfully large edge.

Even if this study points out a lot of things that we TeleReaders already know, it is good that it is being said by people with a little more academic clout than gadfly bloggers. Maybe if enough respectable voices speak up loud enough, lawmakers will finally begin to listen. We can only hope.

Although I have not had time to read the complete study, it may be found here. I’ve stuck it on my loaner PRS-700 for later perusal.

 
0