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Tower of eBabel in EU’s legal sights? Reportedly wants interoperable DRM for music, films and vidgames. E-books, too?
January 4, 2008 | 11:15 am
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By David Rothman
The EU reportedly wants interoperable DRM for music, films and vidgames. E-books, too?
While there’s no legislation here, just, er, a friendly nudge, here’s one more reason for the IDPF to get hopping—and for Amazon to look ahead and stop playing DRM/format games with the Kindle and Mobipocket if it values an international market. So far, the Kindle is officially U.S. only.
The earlier the world standardizes, the more e-books will be soldl. And if it turns out that neither gods nor regulators can make DRM interoperable without its being easily crackable, then let’s find out and consider alternatives such as social DRM. Of course my real favorite remains no DRM. (Arts Technica, Slashdot, MobileRead and TechCrunch.)
Also of possible relevance to books: The EU’s desire to see more than just country-by-country licensing of e-rights. Apparently Euro-level licensing? Yes, that could encourage more competition.
The F word: If interoperability is the goal, then how about the issue of core formats—for all kinds of items, books included? is that mentioned or simply implied? I’m eager to see the source material here.
Technorati Tags: EU,European Union
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Comments:
As I wrote on mobileread; in related news the EU is also pushing for animal-friendly hunting rifles, fish-friendly fishing hooks, (ab)user-friendly narcotics and prisoner-friendly electric chairs.
Seriously though, really bad DRM is the best form of DRM, because then maybe even all the stupid people might realize that DRM is bad and then we might actually get it abolished. However, I fear that instead DRM will become less user-unfriendly to the point where most people barely accept it enough not to boycott it.
This seems to be how most things work. If it was worse then people would feel forced to replace it completely with something better, or if it was better then it would be, well, better. This balancing on the line of tolerance thus maximizes suffering. Usually this is more or less directly the result of someone’s greed.
Marcus The same thing occurred to me – a cold shiver, that crippled literature may by this become universal, or nearly so.
“I fear that instead DRM will become less user-unfriendly to the point where most people barely accept it enough not to boycott it.”
The problem is that such DRM is relatively easy to impose and for most fiction readers no real problem to use.
For study it is a disaster, it creates needless problems in adapting literature, which may not have been that well prepared for study use.
The idea that I could on future readers mark passages that would later be extracted for notes and references in a reliable and automatic way. Perhaps also combined with annotations and databased, or indeed convert whole works into data streams for research confronts encypted text as its first barrier.
Like DVDs the only hope is that such DRM becomes easily crackable. However, DRM remains a problem. Oftgen in teaching I would have liked to have simply copied scenes from DVDs and combine them to present them to class. I tried it once – cracking DVDs meant copying the whole film to the HD (space and very time consuming), then working through edit software, to extract scenes and finally burning the disk – it took days.
Whereas nonencrypted DVDs would have simply meant copying sections as I watched the film and then simply putting the saved scenes together.
Digital communications artificially crippled, does not stop piracy, but it fatally hampers education. What is true for DVDs illustrates the problem with crippling literature.
What do I do with a perfectly readiable ebook, where the publishers have negelected to number the paragraphs? Or have done so in a haphazard way? Or readers that have only limited abiities, I cannot get directly at the text because of DRM, so I have to crack it in order to use it.
Give it six months, because the readers have to un-encrypt the e-book, someone will add an “export button” to some reader – the crime will be that study functions will not be put into mainline reader software, and many readers, who might have thought about studying what they would like to read simply will not do so.