More on TechnologyTell: Gadget News | Apple News
Why the Kindle’s DRM is anti-elderly: AARP should fight against it
February 26, 2009 | 6:12 am
|
By David Rothman
DRM is tough on anyone who wants to own books—not just lease them in effect. Will Company X exist a few decades from now?
Even Amazon isn’t necessarily for eternity. I say this regardless of any visions that Jeff Bezos, the outer-space entrepreneur, may have of Kindle 15s in hotel rooms on Mars. If Amazon dies and your machine does, too, so might access to the books you paid for.
Now here’s another Kindle-related thought. What about DRM’s special hassles for people in their 50s and beyond? I’ll get to the inheritance issue in time—the pesky question of whether you can always pass on a "protected" book to your children or grandchildren. But that’s hardly DRM’s only possible threat to the elderly.
Dimming memories of Bleak House
For example, let’s consider the older people of the future. Memories fade. The gray-haired may well appreciate durable e-books, especially those annotated when the owners were young. But what if, thanks to DRM, the books are lost, just like memories from high school proms or English Lit 101?
In a memorable essay in the New York Times yesterday, Michelle Slatalla wrote of forgetting the details of Bleak House, which she had read decades before. "We are what we remember. At least that’s what the philosopher John Locke believed. And this raises a troubling question for those of us who have reached that nebulous stage in midlife when memory starts to fade noticeably. If my identity was built on top of all the big ideas I’ve encountered, who am I if I’ve forgotten Esther Summerson?"
Yes, Michelle, I know the feeling. Bleak House, however, is at least a public domain book, so an e-copy can last as long as you do. What about the future elderly who want access to Kindle books bought eons ago?
Needless to say, this and other complications might show up with other DRM-infested devices and applications, not just those of Amazon, which I’m mentioning because the company is in the news right now. Amazon’s refusal to make the Kindle able to read ePub, the industry’s standard e-book format, just adds the DRM-related problems here. Plain old eBabel, no DRM needed, could likewise deny owners their future enjoyment of "bought" books when read on future devices.
The inheritance issue—and the question of bequeathing books to friends
Furthermore, to return to the inheritance issue, has anyone studied Amazon’s troublesome terms of service to see if a family member can legally inherit a Kindle book? And what about not just children but also grandchildren and great-grandchildren? I’d welcome assurance from Amazon that it will allow parents, aunts and uncles to pass on their e-books, not just their machines, for generations and generations. Just what’s involved to suit-proof your enjoyment of the books on Grandpa’s Kindle? Will Amazon demand a copy of your birth certificates? I doubt it. Still, you get the point here. And what about unrelated friends; will Amazon let them enjoy the books you bought before you kicked the bucket, as I myself almost did when I suffered a heart attack last fall?
Simply put, will Amazon change the terms of service agreement specifically to allow the elderly to pass their books on to family or unrelated friends? And how easy will it be for the owners to comply with the TOS, in so doing? Are there forms on line now that Kindle owners can fill out to designate beneficiaries? Compared to a diamond ring or watch, mightn’t personal libraries mean even more—to many children who grew up under the intellectual influence of the deceased?
Problems even with a better terms of service
But that still does not address the issue of linking a book’s accessibility to the survival of a company or its continued interest in selling e-books. The AARP, to which tens of millions of older Americans belong, ought to think about a serious war on DRM—already the target of an FTC hearing, which has drawn hundreds of complaints against this hated technology.
The upside of the Kindle for the elderly: The Kindle and other e-book gizmos could be the new large print. This is all the more reason why older people need to care about legalities associated with the machine, which also offers text to speech.
Excerpts from Amazon’s terms of service: In an inheritance context, would any lawyers care to parse the language below from Amazon’s TOS? Here is what’s troublesome to me, as a nonattorney:
Restrictions. Unless specifically indicated otherwise, you may not sell, rent, lease, distribute, broadcast, sublicense or otherwise assign any rights to the Digital Content or any portion of it to any third party, and you may not remove any proprietary notices or labels on the Digital Content. In addition, you may not, and you will not encourage, assist or authorize any other person to, bypass, modify, defeat or circumvent security features that protect the Digital Content…
No Illegal Use and Reservation of Rights. You may not use the Device, the Service or the Digital Content for any illegal purpose. You acknowledge that the sale of the Device to you does not transfer to you title to or ownership of any intellectual property rights of Amazon or its suppliers. All of the Software is licensed, not sold, and such license is non-exclusive.
So what happens to offspring who inherit Kindles? Is inheritance considered the same as a "sale"? How about bequeathing to unrelated friends? And what about the language in the "Restrictions" clause, which bans the assignment of "any rights to the Digital Content or any portion of it to any third party"?
Pro-copyright
Meanwhile, for the benefit of newcomers to the TeleRead site, let me say I’m a big supporter of copyright—just a skeptic toward DRM. I’m absolutely in favor of financial incentives to help encourage creators to create. If publishers are worried about "naked" books without DRM, they might consider an alternative such as social DRM—embedding names and other user-specific information into books. Perhaps social DRM registrations could even include the names of people to whom you wished to bequeath your purchases.
Technorati Tags: AARP,senior citizens,older people,the elderly,older Americans,consumer ripoffs,consumer rip-offs
|
Previous
SUBSCRIBE TO RSS
Comments:
My guess is that an electronic transmission or download of a book is not a physical possession. The purchase is actually an access license, just as a library pays for an on-line journal subscription. I would not be surprised to see the emergence of renewal fees for electronic books if third party transfer is involved.
Library venders of electronic resources have default agreements with cooperative repositories to assure hand-off in event of service discontinuance.
> I would not be surprised to see the emergence of renewal fees for electronic books if third party transfer is involved
Thanks for sharing your thoughts, Gary. But so much for the first sale doctrine, eh? At least that’s the way I see it. If copyright holders can apply such p-book metaphors as one-reader-at-a-time, then perhaps they need to be consistent.
Thanks,
David
(with the usual I-am-not-a-lawyer disclaimer)
Physicality goes beyond ownership. Physicality is an additional kind of content. This is easy to see with something like an ice age stone tool but is less evident with a book. The problem with a book is that the alphabetic encoding competes with the artifact information. This issue then gets larger still concerning the role of physical media to implement comprehension including the comprehension of text. This is the domain of haptics (study of touch as a mode of information). There are indications that the paper book device out-performs the screen book device here, especially in aspects of self authentication.
I think that with this title, you’ve officially jumped the shark.
I get your point. Making it repeatedly has become tiring to read. So I’ve removed you from my RSS subscription list.
BTW, I’m extremely anti-DRM and I’m well beyond 50.
The DRM angle has been beaten fairly heavily, but I thought I’d highlight another angle.
When I was in college, I bought dozens (hundreds? thousands?) of books. In grad school, I bought hundreds more. What happened to these books? Some of them, I still have. But others have fallen away over ten or so moves, a couple of marriages, and life getting in the way. If I’d bought eBooks back then, I’d still have my entire library.
Sure, Amazon should be more open (although let’s not ignore the threat of piracy even as we look for approaches better than DRM), but I’m definitely excited about having access to my library forever.
Rob Preece
Publisher, http://www.BooksForABuck.com
You raise some interesting points David. I suggest one solution is to significantly reduce the length of copyrights. My preference would be to zero but reducing them to 10 or 20 years would be sufficient to allow most people to bequeath their ebook library to their children. This would be best combined with repealing the DMCA laws against developing DRM removal tools so one doesn’t have to rely on Amazon releasing your ebooks from their DRM shackles.
But personally I think that these arguments will become irrelevant as ebook sharing accelerates. Whether Amazon will let you re-download or gift an ebook wont be a concern if you can find a DRM-free version with simple google search.
Gary, BW, Rob and Robbie:
G: Perhaps you could expand and explain the point you’re making here. Don’t dumb down. But do use language appropriate for an intelligent lay readership. Thanks.
BW: You’ll miss out on A LOT of hardware and book news. As for not-so-fond looks at DRM and eBabel, they’re among our specialties because (1) “protection” all all those different e-book tongues can do so much damage to long-term book ownership and (2) the mass media aren’t giving them sufficient coverage. If people like us don’t raise the necessary questions, then who will? As it happens, I doubt that the inheritance angle has come up much before in the DRM debate. I see this site as a public service, and if our watchdog function tires you, then so be it. Of course, the DRM-related posts are minority!
ROB: Amazon is a terrific company in many ways, but it might not be around forever, and I’d rather not trust my library to Jeff and friends. Hey, I love the improvements I’m reading about in the Kindle 2. Let’s just hope that ePub and social DRM come next. I’m fervently hoping Amazon will do the right thing.
ROBBIE: Guess our property right priorities differ, LOL. I’m strongly pro-copyright even though, yes, the current terms ought to be rolled back to their pre-Bono level. Moving on, I totally agree with your about Amazon’s obnoxious DRM causing some people to go elsewhere—including, I suspect, pirate sites.
Thanks,
David
So far as I can see, the agreement does not prohibit taking images of the screen of the Kindle.
I would argue that “permanent copy” means I can make a backup copy by systematically (with a Rube Goldberg setup to turn the pages) taking images of the screen. And taking images is not “circumvention of an effective technical means…” under the DMCA. And the agreement I make upon purchase does not say I can’t take images of the screen. Sort of like acoustic couplers and automatic devices that listened for the phone to ring and answered by moving a part that held the switch hook down, for those who remember the days of Ma Bell’s exclusive access to phone wires.
In the alternative, those images are not the same as the Digital Content, so that my use of them is not limited by the contract, so I don’t even need to argue that they are permitted by the “permanent copy” contract clause. Amazon does not own the copyright to the actual text. Their contract applies to the parts of the digital content not visible on the screen.
Of course, the actual meaning of the terms of this sort of license can never really be known until the court rules on them. Wait, make that the confidential arbitrator, so, each ruling will be secret, and most likely no one knows what happened.
Still, I think that making backup copies of the text, provided I don’t distribute them, would definitely be legal if heard in a U.S. District Court, but who knows what might happen in “confidential arbitration.” But then, how would I ever end up in arbitration if I don’t distribute my images? Also, I think the images could be inherited (especially if done quietly).
I wouldn’t be able to view the images on the device, and if I OCR the images and put it back on in free format, Amazon can tell since they receive “backup copies” of all my files and annotations, and I can’t encrypt them because I can’t modify the software.
This really is a little scary… I probably can’t snoop the traffic between the Kindle and Amazon (and I wouldn’t like it if I could because then anyone else could too) so I can’t tell exactly what the device might be revealing about me and my habits. It might even be sending audio, for all I know. They don’t promise that it won’t, and they certainly go to a lot of trouble to see that I can’t find out. (But then, cell phones have that problem in spades). And Amazon (or their successors upon takeover) can change the privacy policy at will.
I might buy a Kindle, but I will certainly replace it with a free/libre version the instant one becomes available. And I will feel no guilt in transferring my scanned images to the new device. I paid for a copy, and since I will trash the Kindle, I will only be using one copy.
I write Blogs for a site called eldergadget.com and just wanted to share something..A new study shows that 50% of Kindle users are 50 or better..So many users said they like Kindle because they suffer from some form of arthritis that multiple posters indicate that they do or do not have arthritis as a matter of course. A variety of other impairments, from weakening eyes and carpal-tunnel-like syndromes to more exotic disabilities dominate the purchase rationales of these posters. Countless people report being able to read much more with Kindle because it overcomes physical obstacles or limitations that had made reading difficult for them previously.