After the great debates of last week, wherein I attempted to find a middle ground on DRM, I thought I’d let the topic lie for a bit. For the most part because how ever much I learn no one but no one really has as much information at their finger tips as Cory Doctorow and Clay Shirky. They seriously know what they are talking about.
Unfortunately when I came into the office this morning it was to see that DRM was once again in the news. When I wrote the piece I was perhaps slightly self consciously swimming against the tide. However all that is made a mockery of when something like this happens – faith in the system is, well, annihilated and the issues of trust that came up are starkly thrown into relief.
Apparently the problem was a rights one and somewhere down the line the wrong books got into the system in the wrong way. Everyone was re-imbursed and the books are widely available. Does this make any difference to the body blow of seeing 1984 automatically deleted from people’s devices?
No, and I’m not sure what can be done in the wake of this. Responses at Boing Boing and the Electronic Frontier Foundation elucidate the whole range of ways this is not a good thing.
Lets just say if this had come out last Monday, I don’t think the blog posts on DRM would have got written.
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I, for one, am really grateful for your posts last week – I got so much out of the discussion, and was surprised to see my own position on DRM shift as a result. (In particular, I’d thought there was a middle-ground on DRM, and hadn’t thought of it as an inherently extreme position, with DRM-free plus copyright law as the middle ground.) The posts with the comments are now among my favourite resources for intelligent opinions on all sides of the debate.
Heh.
The thing is, you can look forward to more of this sort of thing happening, too.
This debate is like arguing over whether square wheels could be made to work somehow. The wheel has been invented for some time now. Baen’s webscription service has been here for 10 years now. Russians have had their litres.ru up and running since 2007 (if I remember correctly). The wheel works. And surprise – it ain’t square! No DRM, no device lock-in, no geo-restrictions.
This is clearly still a useful topic for dingdongdiscussion on line, though I know it’s frightening being caught in the middle of one. Well done for kicking it off.
Heh. Think that whole 1984 thing is bad? Take a look at this.
http://bit.ly/jCQcT
Really, ‘unscrupulous’ is the first word that springs to mind after you’ve read the referenced article. If DRM is a loaded gun aimed at pirates, Amazon just right now pointed it at their own foot and started repeatedly pulling the trigger. Perhaps the Baen model really is the way to go – all those free texts, and they’re still in business.
Glad you liked my digital escrow notion – it really was a bit of an off the cuff idea, although I rather suspect the same publishers who don’t want you to download a Kindle book more than twice would throw lawsuits at any such escrow scheme since it would remove their control over said texts.
> Perhaps the Baen model really is the way to go – all those
> free texts, and they’re still in business.
Gutenberg is free. Teasers at Baen are free. Webscriptions at Baen are not free. Its a paid subscription service. With Litres you have a choise – you can pay upfront for a file in one of 14 DRM-free formats. Up to 14 downloads per file. Or you can read the book for free online – with lots of ads on the pages. The revenues from those ads then get shared with authors. The payment system is somewhat different as well. Basically, you can transfer money to your Litres account with credit card or PayPal. Then you can pay out of that account for downloadable books. As a result, you don’t have to bother with credit card transaction every time you want to buy a book. I personally prefer this to the Webscription system.
But basically, what neither of these systems are is attempt to mangle some dinosaurian business model to fit on top of the “intertubes”. Both work – in that a) they are more convenient alternatives to hunting stuff down on Darknet and b) they pay the authors. No DRM, no hardware lock-in, no geo-restrictions. None of that nonsense.
Given that working business models exist and have been around for awhile now, why should anyone even debate whether it is possile to get away with building something worse?
While DRM does not work against piracy, piracy does work against DRM. Putting DRM on your content makes the assumption people buy books out of ignorance (of alternatives). Selling them DRM-free makes the assumption they do so out of preference. Last time I checked (about a year ago), SF/F archives on the Darknet totalled for around 7 GB. Any impact piracy has on sales has already been here for years. People who pay for e-books today, do so because they want to. Doesn’t make sense to change their minds, just to accommodate bizdev monkeys at Amazon and Apple playing monopoly – which as mr. Doctorow has been saying, is what the DRM is really about.
> Lets just say if this had come out last Monday,
lets just say?
c’mon, you’re a _publisher,_ for cryin’ out loud…
***
> Lets just say if this had come out last Monday,
> I don’t think the blog posts on DRM
> would have got written.
any competent observer could have known that
– given the combination of licensed books on a
phone-home machine, with storage in the cloud –
instances like the 1984 recall would occur, and
will occur again, any time a court orders it done.
-bowerbird
>>>Lets just say if this had come out last Monday, I don’t think the blog posts on DRM would have got written.
No, the bigger issue is that you never foresaw it could happen. Many of us did. Welcome to the beginning of getting up to speed.
Mike/bowerbird – in the first post I wrote “Worse, it can lead to those files becoming unusable (a situation which is inexcusable)”: this was an issue I was very much aware of!