Jim Baen’s legacy lives on — not just in the realm of e- and p-books, but also related issues such as copyright and DRM.
Eric Flint (picture at right), an associate of Jim’s, has written the first in a planned series of articles lambasting recent copyright law expansion and digital rights management. For this July 4th here in the States, it’s something to ponder.
Eric makes a strong civil-liberties case against the recent rise of DMCA-onerous laws and consumer-unfriendly DRM as a danger to the future of our democracy.
(Detail: I prefer to call DRM “technical protection measures” or TPM.)
As a libertarian (of the pragmatic, not Objectivist variety), I’ve been concerned with this issue for quite a while, and have been meaning to write about it, similar to what Eric plans to do. So Eric’s article has struck a special chord with me, and has also saved me the time and effort to write about it myself!
Eric gives four summary points that will underly his series of articles. He notes:
We’re calling the column “Salvos Against Big Brother” because that captures the key aspect of the problem, so far as Jim Baen and I are concerned. Both the publisher of this magazine and its editor believe that so-called Digital Rights Management (DRM) — by which we mean the whole panoply of ever more restrictive laws concerning digital media, including the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) — are the following:
First, they represent a growing encroachment on the personal liberties of the American public, as well as those of citizens in other countries in the world;
Second, they add further momentum to what is already a dangerous tendency of governments and the large, powerful corporations which exert undue influence on them to arrogate to themselves the right to make decisions which properly belong to the public;
Third, they tend inevitably to constrict social, economic, technical and scientific progress;
And, fourth, they represent an exercise in mindless stupidity that would shame any self-respecting dinosaur.
Eric also quotes Thomas Babington Macaulay who, in 1841, said before the British Parliament:
Copyright is monopoly, and produces all the effects which the general voice of mankind attributes to monopoly . . . I believe, Sir, that I may with safety take it for granted that the effect of monopoly generally is to make articles scarce, to make them dear, and to make them bad. And I may with equal safety challenge my honourable friend to find out any distinction between copyright and other privileges of the same kind; any reason why a monopoly of books should produce an effect directly the reverse of that which was produced by the East India Company’s monopoly of tea, or by Lord Essex’s monopoly of sweet wines. Thus, then, stands the case. It is good that authors should be remunerated; and the least exceptionable way of remunerating them is by a monopoly. Yet monopoly is an evil. For the sake of the good we must submit to the evil; but the evil ought not to last a day longer than is necessary for the purpose of securing the good.
Eric goes on and gives a good overview of the role and purpose of copyright law which I’ve not seen as cogently written — I fully agree with his view that copyright is a monopoly privilege and not a natural right. He then delves into issues of DRM (which really refers to TPM, since some types of DRM, such as a simple copyright statement, don’t utilize technical measures to restrict access to content.)
I look forward to Eric’s next articles. Unfortunately, I don’t see an RSS feed for his column.
Please let others know about Eric’s article. The comments area below is open for your feedback.
(P.S., So my position on DRM and TPM is clear, I do not oppose any and all use of TPM. But I do oppose the use of heavy-duty TPM, such as chaining content to particular hardware, for most types of content used by consumers.)
Hi,
Actually the second article in the series was available in the earc of Jim Baen’s Universe vol2 to appear on August 1, but for several days I’ve been getting an error when clicking on it (I am a subscriber with earc privileges and as mentioned before I have access to more than 70 stories from all the 1st year issues). I do not remember the details since I just browsed it but it was a very cogent attack against drm. When available again as will be soon (maybe rewritten since after all an earc is just that contatining the raw articles and stories), I will post the highlights.
Incidentally even when talking about passwords Mr. Baen before his passing mentioned to the people in charge of the magazine that they should not be something to make life hard for readers, just a low post like a polite reminder that you should support the authors you like.
Liviu
Tiny point — I think that DRM (Digital Rights Management) doesn’t really apply to things like textual copyright statements. I was first introduced to it in Mark Stefik’s 1994 paper, “Letting Loose the Light” (which is available in his book, INTERNET DREAMS, but, apparently, not on the Web). It’s about the idea of tagging digital material with information which describes in a form that a computer can understand the rights that the current possessor has to the content of the document — he later developed this into the idea of DPRL, a language for writing these descriptions in. To my mind, TPM completely includes DRM, and may also include non-digital measures such as locks on books :-).
Well, folks often don’t use the term “DRM” in ways consistent with each other (or even with themselves; compare the 4th paragraph of the article above with the 4th-to-last). But there are some techniques that could be reasonably called DRM by some definitions that are more than just rights statements but less than lockdown of owned content.
For instance, subscription databases will often require you to prove you have a “paid admission ticket” (e.g. by login or IP range for institutional subsciptions) before they’ll give you content, but then they’ll give you content without any further technical restrictions. (Most databases catering to the lbrary community are like this, as is Baen’s own Webscriptions, I believe.) There’s also watermarking/bookstamping, and other techniques that don’t prevent you from doing things with content but do leave some audit trace of what has been done with the content, or whether it’s been paid for. (There are usually ways for motivated folks to defeat those schemes, but if the intent is really to “keep honest people honest”, then those schemes could well suffice, particularly since as Eric points out, pirates can and do easily copy from analog.)
I think advocates of DRM have the burden of defining carefully and precisely what they mean by DRM, and of explaining how what they have in mind will work, what its security limitations are, and what its potential side effects are. There’s so much snake oil being sold both to publishers and customers that buyers should expect nothing less.
Particularly not if what’s being sold is supposedly in an “open, consumer-friendly” format. As far as I’m concerned, no format deserving that label should technically prevent people from doing what they see fit with content they’ve bought and paid for,
Yes, I screwed up in the article in paragraph 4. What I meant to say is that technologies used to restrict (“manage”) access to digital content should be referred to as TPM, and not DRM, since, by my definition (which differs from Bill’s), DRM may or may not include TPM to “manage” the rights. As noted in the article, a simple copyright statement falls under DRM. Quinn Anya Carey had a humorous quote from a very old book which said what God would do to anyone who copied the book. I consider that rights management, maybe PRM for “Paper Rights Management”.
Anyway, the definitions of the terms DRM and TPM are not clear-cut, and their meanings seem to still be in a state of flux. At the Reading 2.0 conference, I brought up the analogy that “UFO” has, over time, become synonymous with “alien spacecraft”, even though the meaning of the acronym UFO is “unidentified flying object”. Obviously, if one believes what they see to be an alien spacecraft, it is no longer unidentified!
Talking of DRM…has anyone noticed the short article on mobileread about Starforce? Everyone who is familiar with computer games has probably hear about Starforce already and now they seem to be set on going for the ebook market. Their description of their own plans sounds like a very weak joke if their protection scheme for books is anything like their unstable, platform bound “copyprotection driver” for games…
get more details here:
http://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=6910