Thanks to everyone for the comments and apologies for igniting the whole debate again. I thought I would collect all my responses together and put them out as a post.
- My position: personally I think DRM is a pain and try and avoid it as much as possible. Professionally I recognise that as a publisher we are obligated in some instances to use it. Before everyone beats us up too much, can I just point out there aren’t many publishers actually selling non-DRM ebooks and actively promoting them, or even embarking on a discussion like this. What I am saying is that I have a lot of sympathy and affinity with the anti-DRM position and strongly support open licences so am not droning out some unthinking policy.
- Andrew Savikas makes a good point when he says a pirated copy is not a lost sale. In a related point Cory Doctorow argues that the viral possibilities of a non-DRM means that it can have more blockbuster potential. I agree with both of these points. However just because a pirated copy does not necessarily equate to a lost sale, it does not mean that it doesn’t all the time.
Margins are tight. On big titles agents will ensure advances are calibrated to the max. That means publishers have to hit very high sales targets to get any kind of return. A 5% loss of sales across big titles over a few years will greatly damage publishers ability to publish big books. So even if there are many new readers being added even a relatively low number of book buyers lost could cause a lot of damage. The thing publishers should learn is not to hit the panic button at the first whiff of piracy but to have a more considered response that doesn’t alienate everyone involved.
As for Cory’s point I think this is true for some works but not all works (as JEB points out). So I agree that having no DRM works exceptionally well for Little Brother (a brilliant book), as indeed it did for NIN and Radiohead. There have now been numerous instances of publishers giving a non-DRM file away, and this leading to a boost in print sales. My argument isn’t with the effectiveness of this, but rather with a) there are some authors for whom this will not work as there audience isn’t right and b) this isn’t really a solid foundation from which is build a range of digital products. As a model I do think this will become more and more prevalent (all good) but also that it has the potential in the long term to undermine that which it currently supports.
- Regarding paper and DRM: I think this is a good metaphor for the expectations we have when we own a book. We expect a degree of control, but we don’t expect to be able to do absolutely anything. Paper/digital isn’t what it is about, rather I am saying that there should be some consistency across how we approach a book and freely acknowledge that present DRM is not doing this.
- A common argument here is that DRM doesn’t work as it doesn’t stop piracy therefore whats the point, lets get read of it. This is like saying the police neither deter nor solve all crimes so whats the point, lets get rid of them. Just because something is not absolutely effective, does not mean it is absolutely ineffective.
- Sean Cranbury calls my final comment “disingenuous”. All I can say is that it was not written disingenuously at all. I am trying to strike a balance that favours readers compared to what exists now! This is about saying, well given that we are not in a position to scrap DRM for all our ebooks (technically impossible under existing arrangements) what can we be doing to improve things?
- To the many points about how DRM can make life difficult for ordinary readers, I agree and always have agreed. My reasoning for DRM not being 100% bad is that it can help mitigate risk. However we can all, I think, acknowledge that, bluntly, a lot of existing solutions suck. Cory Doctorow made many interesting points about the difficulties in creating a more humane DRM system to which I don’t have an immediate answer. What I can say is that these should not stop us from trying even if it is hard, and I would be happy to get involved with standards bodies to fight for a better consumer experience re DRM. It might be challenging but we should give it a shot anyway – better to have tried and failed etc.
- Gary Gibson (a Pan Mac SF author whose non-DRM ebooks are available on the website) made a brilliant suggestion that some kind of digital escrow account is what we need. I could see this being run by an independent body like the IDPF or the BISG in concert with publishers. Such a project might offer a workaround to those objections that focus on the concentration of DRM in the hands of a few big players and the added cost burden DRM places on digital products by being a non-profit. This would also get round many of the difficult scenarios presented by Cory Doctorow. David Smith’s point about a rental model being a good way of getting round this is exactly what I mean when I say we need to be open to new business models. A subscription/library style service could work for everyone.
I realise that saying something positive for DRM is not going to win me any friends (in public at least). Most of the objections to DRM are fair and publishing will no doubt follow a path similar to the record industry. Equally though blanket condemnation of DRM without an acknowledgment that it can play a role in maintaining the lifeblood of content industries is telling only one part of the story. I’m not saying the current IP framework is perfect, just that elements of it are important.
Given that the weight of industry opinion demands DRM for our files, isn’t it better to try and make sure that DRM is as inclusive, flexible and consumer oriented as possible, instead of just going with the flow?
Many of the questions here seem to be about what the concept of “ownership” is in the digital age, and these are not fully resolved yet. I certainly don’t pretend to have all the answers!
69 Comments
“My argument isn’t with the effectiveness of this, but rather with a) there are some authors for whom this will not work as there audience isn’t right and”
Which audience is right for DRM? Where’s the poll that shows you readers who say, “I’ll pay more for that book if it does less?” or “I was going to pirate this, but now that you’ve made it available with DRM, I’ll pay for it?
“b) this isn’t really a solid foundation from which is build a range of digital products.”
Au contraire: the Internet (no DRM): widest range of services ever seen. AOL (DRM): narrow range of services, now defunct.
CD: No DRM. Now given rise to iPods, WinAMP, alarm clocks, burners, etc
DVD: DRM. 13 years after its introduction, the total range of “digital services” on offer is: DVD players.
I’m surprised you cited (anonymous, non-credible) JEB as a source for these conclusions, given that his entire argument consisted of illiterate ad hominem and special pleading.
Escrow is just interoperability by another name. If I’m going to escrow the cleartext of books from DRM A and DRM B, I need some way to translate the permissions between them. Which brings you back to 5C, 4C and CORAL, all of whom have spectacularly failed in exactly the way described on the last post.
Also: given that DRM vendor A doesn’t WANT publishers’ customers to move their books to DRM vendor B’s products (viz. Apple’s threat to sue Real if Real made a converter to turn Apple DRM into Real DRM; DVD consortium’s lawsuit against Real for making a converter that turns DVD DRM into Real DRM). So you’re going to have to bell the cat. This is something MUCH bigger and meaner rightsholders (MPAA, RIAA) have been trying to do for DECADES and it’s been an abject failure.
Good luck with that.
“A common argument here is that DRM doesn’t work as it doesn’t stop piracy therefore whats the point, lets get read of it. This is like saying the police neither deter nor solve all crimes so whats the point, lets get rid of them. Just because something is not absolutely effective, does not mean it is absolutely ineffective.”
No, it is nothing like that argument. The point is that if DRM lets one single copy onto the darknet (or if a copy ends up there by other means such as by scanning), then any potential customer gets to choose whether to download it for free or pay for it (this “darknet hypothesis” originates with Microsoft’s Trusted Computing team, a group of pro-DRM technologists who created the largest, most credible DRM to date; their work resulted in changes to the reference design of every laptop and desktop motherboard currently shipping).
In that world, customers have to be enticed, not coerced, into buying rather than stealing. And DRM is not an enticement; it’s a repellent.
Here’s a better analogy: “This is like saying the condoms with giant holes in them neither prevent disease nor pregnancy, whats the point, lets get rid of them. They are absolutely ineffective and if we want to solve this important problem we need more than hopefulness.”
I think your fundamental problem is that you are convinced your income relies on something like DRM, and don’t want to believe the people pointing out detailed reasons and examples why it’s unworkable in theory and practice; and as you note, your current business arrangements require you to defend the indefensible rather than admit to yourself and your shareholders that you were sold a pup.
DRM is utter snake oil. It can’t work in theory and it doesn’t work in practice. But it’s such enticing snake oil that DRM vendors sell ineffectual solutions to vendors over and over. This is explained better by human psychology than by business reasons.
As Cory notes in @1, please detail the markets for which DRM (even a theoretically workable and interoperable one) would be just the right thing. It’s odd that you haven’t so far.
Correction: “… sell ineffectual solutions to publishers, over and over.”
You were sold 100% snake oil. You need to admit this to yourself.
You say “It might be challenging but we should give it a shot anyway – better to have tried and failed etc.”. And you’re wrong. While you’re wasting years trying to achieve the impossible, Pan MacMillan will lose control of their distribution channels. Put the effort into educating and negotiating with your business partners to replace these “existing arrangements” that are preventing you from ensuring a long-term future for your company by selling products that consumers actually want.
I’ll take DRM. Seriously, I’ll happily put up with any restrictions you want to impose. Limit it to one device, don’t let me lend it out, prevent me selling it on. Seriously, I’ll take those and anything else.
Just one condition. Make it cheaper. Economically compensate me for the “loss” of use I’d get with a regular book.
If I can buy a paper book for £10 on Amazon, a DRM ebook should cost about £1.
I’m quite serious. If I lend a book out twice, I can borrow a book twice. After I’ve finished reading it, I can sell it for a few pounds. I can do none of those things with DRM. I can accept that as long as the net cost to me is reduced in line with what I’ve lost.
You talk about margins – the business model changes when you’re no longer buying wood to pulp into paper, but servers to handle your downloads. Yes there are up front costs, but is the act of CTRL+C & CTRL+V really as expensive as inking the plates and trucking books to the nearest Waterstones?
DRM – if it is to work – must be a quid pro quo. At the moment it’s too heavily stacked in your favour.
T
Thank you for attempting to take such a balanced perspective, and thanks to the commenters for giving good counterarguments.
@Cory: “The point is that if DRM lets one single copy onto the darknet (or if a copy ends up there by other means such as by scanning), then any potential customer gets to choose whether to download it for free or pay for it”
I agree that every interesting bit of stuff that can be displayed on a screen can always be copied, given time and effort. There is no way to create a perfect DRM.
But the corrollary that users can choose between paying and freeloading is only true for those that are willing and able to use the darknet. If the darknet is closed, then it is difficult for customers to use it, and if it is open, then it gets poisoned by rights holders ad malware distributors.
I totally agree with you that DRM is evil, i.e. I would prefer to live in a world without DRM, because I think that culturally, the drawbacks outweigh the benefits. But it seems that many business models benefit from DRM.
Take the AppStore, for example: every App there gets pirated, quickly. But searching and downloading and installing the pirated copy is often tedious, time-consuming and potentially dangerous, and update and backup services are usually missing.
Thus, users will fall into segments: there will be die-hard pirates, which will not buy the application if it costs a single penny, and which will go to great lengths to obtain the pirated version. On the other hand, there is a large group of law-abiding customers that will not install any pirated app, even if the DRM of the pay-version annoys them. And then there is a middle ground which simply considers paying and pirating as trade-offs. These opportunists will be swayed by availability, price, usability, risk and time investment. Meaning that, depending on price, target audience and usability impairments, DRM will often result in more sales, and sometimes in fewer sales.
This is true for Apple’s Appstore, and I expect that it is going to be true for eBooks as well, as long as books are channelled through existing business pipelines (i.e., publishers and centralized outlets).
In a world that revolves solely around authors and readers, the story might be quite different. I can see how Pan Macmillan does not prefer to live in such a world.
Joscha Bach : the analogy to the App Store is flawed, since the iPhone is a platform on which *nothing except DRM’ed code* can be run.
For starters, this is not true of PCs and never will be. It has also failed in every ebook context, as every single ebook reader vendor has been forced by market pressure to add support for non-DRMed PDFs, etc.
When the iPhone launched, potential iPhone owners didn’t have a wide variety of iPhone-capable apps on their hard drives that the iPhone DRM prevented them from seeing (though let’s note here that iPhone DRM doesn’t stop you from loading pirated ebooks on your iPhone and reading them — it doesn’t even slow you down; this is as easy to do on an iPhone as it is on every other device ever created). So people bought iPhones.
This is not true of text files. We have millions of text files, from emails to web-pages to PDFs to our shopping lists, and we want to read them on our ebook readers. If you try to sell an ebook reader that won’t let users load their own files on it, you will go broke. (If you’d care to make it interesting, I’ll put $1,000 on that proposition and we can take out a Long Bet).
Now, if you *do* allow users to load their own ebooks on the device, then the darknet hypothesis still holds. All you need to do to download a pirated book is search for it on Google — some authors even search out their own books as pirate books when they don’t have the electronic text handy. It’s that easy. Once you have the pirate ebook, you load it on your reader and voila, darknet hypothesis.
For your idea to hold true, we need a combination of:
* Devices and PCs that don’t let you see any documents at all unless they have DRM on them; and
* Google to get progressively worse; and
* Internet users to get progressively worse at searching.
This is not a plausible scenario, not even in science fiction (trust me, I’m a professional).
> there are some authors for whom this will not work as there audience
as there audience?
c’mon, you’re a _publisher,_ for cryin’ out loud…
> therefore whats the point, lets get read of it.
whats the point? lets get? get read of it?
c’mon, you’re a _publisher,_ for cryin’ out loud…
***
> It might be challenging but we should give it a shot anyway –
> better to have tried and failed etc.
…and the wisdom to know the difference…
-bowerbird
I am not an author. I am only a reader. Some years ago, when I didn’t know nothing about DRM, I bought some DVD and one or two CD with DRM.
Result: I can’t see those DVD in my favourite DVD player. I don’t have a TV set or living-room DVD player. Only my computer, which runs GNU/Linux. Because in my country it is illegal to break DRM, I can’t see the DVD I bought. I can’t transfer those CD into my mp3 player, again, because I can’t break DRM.
I am not a computer science expert, but I could technically break the DRM, but it is illegal so I will not do it.
But I don’t and will never buy anything with DRM and I don’t buy anything without DRM, that gives money to enterprises that support DRM in other products.
I love books, I buy a minimum of 60 books (paper ones) per year. I would love to buy an ebook reader and ebooks. But I will never buy any of this, because I will never take the risk of being deprived of the books I bought.
A publisher that uses DRM is not worth of trust. The point of DRM is to restrict something. They can say “we only want to restrict a little”. Right. Tomorrow they can think “hmm… it is not fair that our clients can listen a machine reading our ebooks” and they cut that option. Oh wait, they already did it – I am still figuring out how they will compensate the machine for author rights. It’s a machine reading a text!
The day after tomorrow they could think that you, that bought that ebook, are only allowed to read it twice, while sitting in a green chair. No way.
When there is a film in theater, and this film is from a major that is pro-DRM, I refuse to go and see it. And I don’t download it from internet either. I will not see it, I will not talk about it and I will not recommend it to my friends.
Result of this? I am discovering beautiful music from bands that are DRM-free, I am discovering great films in public domain or creative commons licenses, I am reading classics in ebook format.
I saw Doctorow was releasing Content, I went to the website, read the first chapter, went to amazon and bought it in paper and read it in paper.
My husband loves books, but hates ebooks. He bought Overclocked, from Doctorow, in amazon (used & new I think) and he was reading it and at some point there were some pages missing.
He contacted the seller and they answered him that he could return the book and would have a refund or they could give him a small discount. So, he accepted the discount.
He went to the book website, read the missing pages online and returned to the paper book.
If Cory Doctorow didn’t had the book available, my husband would have returned the book and that book would be not useful for anyone else. And my husband had to stop reading the book for more than a week.
So, here you have an example of having a book in CC can represent a sale.
I don’t understand people who are buying Kindles and other pro-DRM ebook readers. But what I really don’t understand is why publishers are making the same mistakes that film and music industry have done. Shouldn’t publishers have learned something by now?
My mother language is not English, so please excuse me if I made some mistake.
As a 20+ year book industry professional, I feel that I have a pretty thorough view of the book retailing and book wholesaling industry. I sympathize with the writer’s comment that it won’t be popular to say anything positive about DRM. Up until very recently, I would’ve said categorically that DRM is the way to go. I worked for two years in the music industry (managing book sales) for Tower Records and my views are tempered by my observations in that industry. What I find most depressing about debating this with anti-DRM voices is that they are like free-market worshipers: all is black or white and there are (apparently) absolutely no, not one single, valid reason to support a world with DRM. That clearly just isn’t the case. DRM was essentially the way the world worked until the digital age, simply because of the practicality of making copies.
Digital DRM clearly CAN work – DVD’s are a cited example. Console videogames seem pretty protected. iPod (pre “+” days) was pretty effective I think. The Kindle seems to be having a go at it (if people are pirating, I can tell you none of my friends know how to – the same friends that easily used Napster.) I’m trying to understand why you say it CAN’T work. Are these examples invalid?
I’m a strong believer in the rights of creative artists to control the distribution of their copyrighted content. Obviously, I have no problems with them choosing a non-DRM distribution method just as I’m happy to let them have more control over distribution using a DRM method. In the world of software, shareware is fine with me (good luck if the experience of developers I know is any guide), but I also recognize that requiring a purchased key to activate a software package is reasonable, workable, and the prerogative of the creator. Most of the software I use works like this.
The music industry is a shell of what it once was. Those of us who suffered through the transition now accept this (what choice do we have?). However, I certainly can’t blame anyone for looking hard at whether to open up Pandora’s box. I don’t think the answer is as obvious as the (at times sneering) voices of the anti-DRM movement would have you think.
Best,
Mark Evans
Ann Arbor, MI
“Given that the weight of industry opinion demands DRM for our files, isn’t it better to try and make sure that DRM is as inclusive, flexible and consumer oriented as possible, instead of just going with the flow?”
This would only make sense as a strategy if your revenues came from other members of your industry instead of, say, the public, because believe me, if we’re weighing opinion in order to guide decisionmaking, public opinion about DRM is going to require scales denominated in metric tons.
The condition of having a business model entirely supported by industry insiders, with no regard to clear and universal public preference, probably doesn’t apply to you, but there is one segment of the industry it does apply to — DRM vendors. The product they sell does not work as advertised, the few functions it does ship with are degraded within days if not hours of launching, and its principal effect on your business is to deliver the lion’s share of revenue to hardware vendors.
Overpaying for a product that wastes your time and money, while failing to deliver the promised benefits and weakening your bargaining with device makers however, is a minor disadvantage compared to the long-term threat, which is failing to figure out how to make money in the future. Every day your strategy is to hope that your customers will learn to treat digital objects as if they were as inconvenient as physical ones is another day your competition gets a chance to win us over.
“Digital DRM clearly CAN work – DVD’s are a cited example. ”
DVD DRM has been broken since 1999, broken by Jon Lech Johansen and two anonymous confederates and leaked onto the Internet. You can buy commercial products at Fry’s for 19.99 that will break the DRM on your DVDs. They sell this software at Heathrow in the terminal.
The net impact of DVD DRM has been to retard the growth of what Michael calls “a range of digital products” — DRM doesn’t stop copying, but it does allow the DVD consortium to sue companies that make DVD-interoperable products, such as Kaleidascape’s DVD jukebox (a product that ripped DVDs and stored 100 of them, with DRM, on a hard drive so that you could use them on a media server).
Clay Shirky, ladies and gennulmen! Let’s give him a big round of applause! New York Times bestseller! DRM free!
Hey, Cory – Yes, I thought you might say that. I realize this isn’t a rigorous sampled study, but I know many, many, many (including some really technically challenged people) that traded music on the net. I’m pretty sure not one of them copied a DVD. Are there some technical downsides to DRM (your jukebox example)? Yes – I doubt the labels are particularly torn up about it and I would, ultimately, come down on the side of making sure the directors, writers, set designers, actors, and yes, the labels got their payment over supporting a new, fancy jukebox device. That’s my value system (and the law at this point, I guess.)
Well, absent DRM is *isn’t* the law. Adding DRM to a product *does* make it illegal to make a separate player for it, but there’s no indication that this is a good thing. Remember that the record, the radio, the TV, the cable system, the jukebox and the VCR all imported old media into their new format against the wishes of the content owners of the day. The Tower Records you worked in owes its very existence to the fact that it used to be legal to pour the old wine into a new bottle without permission (indeed, it still is, unless there’s DRM: that’s why you can go load a web-page designed to work with Netscape in 1999 with your copy of Firefox from 2009: the rightsholder doesn’t get a say on what kind of device you look at his work on).
If no one copies DVDs, then why does the entertainment industry have its panties in such a ferocious knot over DVD piracy?
Thank you Mark!
You just pointed out the entire problem with the pro-DRM voices (unintentionally of course).
>DRM was essentially the way the world worked until the digital age, simply because of the practicality of making copies.
DRM is merely an attempt to put analog constraints on a digital world. DRM is the way the world worked until now. DRM doesn’t work anymore. The world has moved on. Why can’t publishers get that? I understand that it’s upsetting that your old business models that stood untouched for decades and made you lots of money are no longer viable. But no amount of DRM is going to bring back the Good Ol’ Days. Digital consumers will not accept an analog restriction on their purchases.
It’s like that Vincent Ferrari-AOL Cancellation call.
(paraphrase)
Ferrari: Cancel the account.
AOL Rep: Was there a problem with the account?
Ferrari: Cancel the account.
AOL Rep: I see that it has been used…
Ferrari: Cancel the account.
etc etc
The DRM version is:
Consumer: I don’t want DRM.
Publisher: Don’t worry, this is customer-friendly DRM!
Consumer: I don’t want DRM.
Publisher: This DRM is painless!
Consumer: I don’t want DRM.
Publisher: Well you’re getting DRM whether you like it or not.
Consumer: Okay, I’m not buying your product. Good day.
Publisher: No wait, did I mention this isn’t DRM? It’s just a…um… a FEATURE. Yeah!
Didn’t mean to imply that DRM is required by law. Not clear exactly what you mean by the “wine” comment (?) – Tower (now gone) pretty much existed due to the sales of new CD’s. Also, don’t mean to imply that no DVD’s are pirated – I do know that this happens a lot – just that ease of sharing and ease of access are factors and that sharing can be greatly discouraged via DRM. DVD sharing, I believe (again no hard facts) is a small fraction of music sharing. A lot of this is just the practicality of transferring files over the net as well, so on the flip side this may increase dramatically. Anyway, my point is not to dismiss every anti-DRM argument but to impress that I do personally believe that the arguments are more nuanced than the anti-DRM voices can sometimes have you believe.
I think you’re missing the nuance, Mark. In 1908, the sheet music industry (composers) sued the record companies for making records of sheet music without permission. They believed that it should be illegal to make records without their permission, and they didn’t want to give their permission (John Philip Sousa: “If these internal talking machines are allowed to continue, man will lose his voicebox as he lost his tail when he came down from the trees.”
Congress told the composers that they were wrong. They said that composers *did not* “control the distribution of their copyrighted content.” They *ordered* composers to license their music to records, because the public wanted records and Congress were going to give them to them.
That system is still in place today. If you want to release an album of Beatles songs, Michael Jackson songs, or John Philip Sousa songs, you can — just pay a fixed fee to a collecting society and no one can stop you. All legal.
The Tower Records you worked at existed only because creators didn’t get to “control the distribution of their copyrighted content.” In that store, you had hundreds, if not thousands of discs with one or more tracks licensed under the compulsory mechanical license.
What’s more, this happened again and again: blanket licenses cover radio play, cable and jukeboxes, while VCRs and other media (like iPods and web-browsers) rely on fair use to copy and play back old media in new ways.
This is the nuanced position: that “control the distribution of their copyrighted content” needs to be tempered with the public interest and fairness to people who buy media. Home recording, moving to new formats, and all the other activities prohibited by DRM are out of keeping with the proven history of successful media. Every successful new medium has relied on limits to “control the distribution of copyrighted content” in order to thrive — from movies to TV, from radio to cable, from records to VCRs, from PVRs to iPods.
It is a blunt and poorly considered (and ahistorical and improbable) position to assert that creators “control the distribution of their copyrighted content.” It has never been thus (except for a few DRM disasters — remember, the record industry never had a DRM-free store until AFTER it annihilated itself with DRM propositions that no one took them up on, from Real to OpenAG to Napster to WMA). To assert it is to ignore all the nuance and subtlety of the history of media in favor of a platitude with no grounding in law, business or the marketplace.
As a 25+ year consumer, a 20+ year creator and a 1+ year publisher, I also feel that I have a pretty thorough view about what is acceptable and what’s not.
I sympathize with the commenters thoughts. Since the beggining, I say categorically that DRM shouldn’t exist at all. I work for more then a decade in the music business (as a creator and the founder of a record label). My views are tempered by my observations of everything: as a consumer, as an artist and creator, as a publisher and as a friend of many in those several positions.
What I find most depressing about debating this with pro-DRM voices is that they refuse to admit that DRM, in its core, takes rights and freedom from consumers, and to admit that restricting consumers rights is bad for everyone: the culture, the society, consumers in general and markets in particular, most prominently the “cultural markets”, where pro-DRM people invariantly have interests.
Yes, of course. For instance the Home Taping Is Killing Music campaign never existed.
Define “work”. Work as in “piracy rates are rising”, or as in “people buy less movies”, or in the sense of “people like Paula (above comment) stop buying movies”, or is it in the sense of “DRM is there but everyone breaks it anyway since it is so easy that sometimes people break it without knowing”, or is it the “people are starting to care less about laws because they find some of them stupid, something that starts worrying the USA and EU as a possible reason for a degradation of quality of life in democratic societies”, or are we talking about the “EU recommends movies not to be distributed with DRM”? Choose your poison.
Sure, specially if they don’t protect it with DRM systems. When they do, fiasco’s like Spore happen (have you noticed the lack of DRM on EA’s games after Spore? Ask them why…)
So much that consumers pressure forced the appearance of the “plus days”.
Yeah, you surely don’t read the same sources as me, there’s been a huge backlash on Kindle and Amazon thanks to their DRM, If you want to see how is being the users experience with Kindle thanks to DRM, take this as an example. I’ve been reading blog posts like that at a rate of (more or less) one every two days. From different people, of course.
Because it doesn’t do what it is supposed to (stop copyright infringement), and at the same time restricts people from their rights (for instance, as a Portuguese I have the right of making a private copy of some copyrighted content I have, but if a DVD has DRM then I can’t make that backup).
Yes.
…and that can be achieved thanks to the copyright laws. You have the right to choose whether your creation can be distributed (CC licenses help you in that) or not (typical copyright).
Shareware doesn’t have (well, I never saw it) DRM. Having an activation key is different than having hardware. Ask every gamer that is pissed off because they can’t sell/buy 2nd hand DRM’d games (if you do some research you will see that the 2nd hand market on games is HUGE).
Is it? I keep reading that, but then people are only talking about the financial health of major labels… You have now more music, more variety, more bands/artists, more concerts, more choice, more experimentation and more innovation in the music world than EVER. What’s wrong with this?
Stop living in the past, stop trying to live out of an obsolete business model and embrace new models. It’s not a threat, it’s an opportunity, you just have to see it that way.
There’s no Pandora box. There’s only a bi-polar system with creators and consumers that can only work well when there’s balance. Balance doesn’t mean “the creator calls the shots”, nor “the consumer always gets what it wants”. But it certainly means “no DRM”.
Cory – Thanks for the information. I freely admit that my knowledge of the history of these issues is not extensive and surely short of yours. I will point out, however, that I did not assert that today (or ever) that creators “control the distribution of their copyrighted content” but that I am a strong supporter of that concept. And I am. I also support the concept of “fair use” and reasonable accommodation to consumer interests (things which you surely also know more about than me.) Can these concepts be at odds at times? Yes. My point is that DRM is not evil and is not always impractical and that the issues are complex.
Not sure about the Tower assertion – I will take you at your word, but I believe Tower was largely filled with CD’s from artists and labels that were not forced to have their music sold but wanted to sell their music. Again, I could be wrong and perhaps the proportion of “forced sales” were much higher than I realize. I certainly don’t have any facts to support that.
Yes, the music industry never had a DRM-free store. It is not possible to go back and see what would have happened had they embraced the concept. I have seen a lot of data on this point, however, and I can tell you that for every physical CD sale that they lost to sharing a fraction of that ends up in on-line sales. So, yes – an equilibrium of sorts is being reached but the total market size in dollars is dramatically smaller (although the amount of music consumed is much higher.) I have no doubt that many consumers are very happy with this arrangement – a lot of people get a lot of free music, and those that purchase DRM-free music have a lot of flexibility in use of that music.
cory, i’m a big fan of yours, from rip: a remix to your blogs and books. i haven’t had the chance to buy little brother in paper as of yet, but i want to because if you give someone a paper book, they might read it. if you give them a pdf… i don’t know anyone who will read a pdf. i did however, just read your book as a pdf- IN ONE SITTING. understand, i would not have, except that i was looking for pdf’s with a cc license. forget drm! i’m trying to get away from books that call copying “piracy.” i’m trying to get away from books that you aren’t given PERMISSION to copy.
another one i’m reading is free culture by lessig (i just finished future of ideas before reading little brother.) i keep trying to figure out who is more to the left, you or lessig. obviously not lessig, if you read free culture. but you’re both personal heroes. now one thing i do know is- drm BURNS books. from free culture you gain the understanding that the public domain has been stolen by expanding legislation, and even fair use is being attacked through code. then the code is protected…
thus copy-protection becomes a proxy through which public rights that cannot be eliminated (only reduced to nominal levels) through congress (who have, or had, a constitution to consider) can be eliminated through drm- books can destroy themselves, and destroy reasonable access. i’m not asking you to put your mickey pirate shirt on and “download a movie,” but there’s NO room in this world for books that cannot be read FREEly, like old books can. NO ROOM, cory. and no business is WORTH burning books with code.
that is not an extreme point of view. the extreme point of view is that books should have drm- ever. the cost of drm to public wealth is higher than the courts would ever allow through copyright directly. that should tell you a whole lot. you know what i think the solution is for companies that insist on drm? go back to PAPER. seriously, IF YOU’RE NOT READY for drm-free ebooks, DON’T DO EBOOKS at all. drm infested e-books aren’t a compromise, they’re an abomination- an attack on the simplest liberties of sharing what you read. and of anyone on earth, this should be most obvious to you… and ray bradbury. you updated 1984 beautifully, you know. how about writing a 21st century fahrenheit 451? it could be about acta, drm, and adobe. ok, not adobe. don’t want to burn bridges, just to make a point about doing it to books. repent, remix, and thin fair use no more!
“DRM was essentially the way the world worked until the digital age, simply because of the practicality of making copies.”
No. Oh god no.
DRM is, as Sagodjur points out, an attempt to make the digital world *worse* than the analog one. All of the inconvenience of physical objects, with none of the attendant advantages (e.g. loanability and preservation and first sale rights and all the rest of it.)
This is, to me, the core of the argument. There are a bunch of people who think that businesses that used to work because they solved a problem for the customer should be able to continue to exist even after the problem they solved is gone, even if keeping them in business involves destroying the new solutions, in order to maintain the profit margins that came from servicing the old problem.
You say “I’m a strong believer in the rights of creative artists to control the distribution of their copyrighted content.” Sure, why not? And while we’re at it, we can be strong believers in breathing under water, or living to 130. Those ideas are similar to the idea of controlling distribution, in that there are a whole bunch of people who think they would be really really great. They’re all similar in another way too. Can you guess what it is?
The problem you are grappling with is not a matter of law, or culture, or technology. It’s a matter of a deep truth about the universe — numbers don’t have copies. A 5 is a 5 is a 5; no mack daddy has ever said, to the object of his affection, “Give me a copy of your phone number.” The result is that the right to control the distribution of copyrighted content *is not something that can be granted*, if wer are in a world where computers exist, and where copies are expressed as numbers.
And the entire edifice of DRM and “Trusted Computing” and plugging the analog hole and all the rest of it is an attempt to create a world where computers don’t exist, where the public no longer has access to general-purpose digital tools. And as Cory has pointed out, one single leak, once, is enough to seed the darknet, and the real logic of numbers takes over from the emulated logic of things.
And as we know from the music industry, the cost of trying to create a world that is digital but hostile to users grows geometrically with the popularity of the content, until you reach the point where 110% of the margin is being handed over the device manufacturers and DRM sales guys.
oh no, i’m an idiot. anyone (including me) who thought i was responding to cory, (i found this article through his twitter) i wasn’t responding to cory after all, but michael bhaskar. cory: i’m sorry, my FAIL. mr. bhaskar: my argument stands- though i do appreciate that your “rhetoric” is less “rhetorical” than i’m accustomed to, obviously i don’t agree with it. cory: think about that updated f-451. since you’re in london and from canada, you could call it celsius 233.
Clay, I think you have some valid points. I do personally try to separate the reasons for DRM. The argument that it is technically unfeasible is very different from the argument that the consumer is unhappy or that the resulting product is inferior or less useful. I would argue that a digital format still has many advantages even if there are copy restrictions.
We’ve already discussed some DRM schemes that were effective in eliminating or deterring sharing. It is possible that, in the end, your vision of how creative digital products should be marketed will prevail. I’m just not clear that will result in the best balance between consumer/public interests and copyright holder interests.
Thanks for a very interesting discussion. I’m running late and gotta go. Best,
Mark
I realize this question/opinion has the potential to irritate -every- side in this debate, and is also a departure from the debate as it stands. But this quote bothered me:
“There have now been numerous instances of publishers giving a non-DRM file away, and this leading to a boost in print sales. My argument isn’t with the effectiveness of this, but rather with a) there are some authors for whom this will not work as there audience isn’t right”
It sounds here like DRM is being used to artificially inflate sales of products which, on their own merit, wouldn’t sell at all. By the mechanic of “you can’t tell you don’t want to buy the product until we already have your money.”
I don’t mean to insult anyone’s work, but that’s unethical and “evil” in whole other ways than those usually attributed to DRM.
Publishing might take a clue from the music industry. When the price of a song fell to under $1, piracy became less attractive, because that price was deemed fair, while $16 for 10 crap songs and 1 good one obviously wasn’t.
Most buyers of e-books resist paying more than $9.99 for an e-book, and many think $7 or $5 is a reasonable amount to pay. But I doubt publishers will be willing to drop their prices as long as Amazon takes 65% of the retail price of Kindle books and enforces the terms of their digital printing contract, that the publisher can’t set a lower retail price elsewhere.
“We’ve already discussed some DRM schemes that were effective in eliminating or deterring sharing.”
Sure, but those were the schemes that were best at emulating a world without computers. (Consider Cory’s Long Now bet as another version of this observation.)
I also don’t think that technical infeasibility is different from consumer unhappiness or the inferiority of the product, since all of those things have, as their starting point, preventing us from treating numbers as numbers.
And there is, of course, no such thing as a “best” balance — that is something of a cop out. What there are are revenues, and viability. For-profit businesses trying to maximize revenues by emulating a world with no computers can’t do it on their own. This creates two negatives. One is commercial — you will hand over increasingly high percentages of your margins to other firms. The other is political — you will increasingly have to call for the government to render general-purpose computing devices illegal. (Lest this seem like hysterical techno-libertarian ranting, let me direct you to the newspaper industry, some of whose members are seriously considering a proposal asking the US government to outlaw *linking*. To, you know, restore the best balance between their old business model and users who would like to take advantage of the world as it is.)
The political negative we will fight you on politically — proposals to gut the internet to save your old ways of doing business will always draw our ire.
The commercial negative is different, because it’s about your long-term viability, which we are concerned about as well. Your old business model is over, and you’re going to have to jump. You can jump into the arms of people who run a protection racket with no guarantees and almost no protection, or you can jump into the arms of your own readers. Neither jump will be easy, because doing stuff like giving Jane Austen a new cover and then selling it is ending, as a money-maker, but jumping to a model where the people who love the stuff you produce will be inconvenienced every single day we stay faithful to you is going to be worse for your long-term viability than taking your chances with the people who actually care about what you do.
It seems bitterly inevitable that the people best placed to take advantage of the new way the world works are also the ones who most keenly perceive the transition as a scary or unworkable thing, as it departs from the established conventions they have spent a lifetime immersing themselves in. The transition must, then replace them, though they ought to be the people best qualified to enable it, and to benefit from it. social change is hard. Forgive my verbosity, it is late, I am too weary for the eloquence this deserves.
If you believe in fair use, you can’t believe in DRM.
Here’s how fair use works: you make a copy. The rightsholder says it isn’t fair. You say it is. A judge decides.
Here’s how DRM works: you make a copy, circumventing the DRM to do so. No matter why you made that copy, you have broken the law. The judge doesn’t get to evaluate whether the use is fair, because circumventing DRM is illegal per se.
@Cory In your last comment you conflate DRM and the DMCA. Breaking DRM isn’t illegal everywhere…yet.
@Mark Evans – Re: Your comment about the ease of use of napster versus the ease of use of other copying methods — copy and paste is a pretty effective way of stealing someone’s writing. Your friends surely must use that. Just yesterday, at Teleread.org, Paul Biba pirated Michael’s post using the tried and true copy and paste . (http://www.teleread.org/2009/07/14/drm-is-not-evil-says-the-digitalist/) Reprinted without permission I presume. As for copying DVDs http://handbrake.fr/ is darn ease to use.
“Breaking DRM isn’t illegal everywhere…yet”
It is illegal in every country that’s a WIPO Copyright Treaty signatory, which is, to some approximation, every developed nation in the world. Can you think of one that ISN’T a WCT signatory? All the EU is bound by the EUCD. Various US trade deals have brought this to South America (Andean trade treaties), Central America (CAFTA), Singapore, Australia, Japan, etc.
34
Yeah, but the DRM snake-oilers and media Canuters want it to be.
34 = 33, whoops.
Not that it matters. Doctorow knows and tells all, again, anyway.
Again, thanks all for the comments. Somehow I seem to have become a kind of cheer leader for DRM and “corporate dinosaur” – both of which feel strange and very much not me! A few points:
- I am NOT arguing a pro-DRM position. I am just basically saying what Mark Evans pointed out: that there are a number of views, all of which deserve to be heard. I am explicitly not trying to make some corporate argument for DRM, but open up a discussion about it.
- At Pan Macmillan we are NOT rampantly pro-DRM. In fact with the exception of O’Reilly I think we are doing more than anyone to try and get our editions out without DRM. The silent majority of publishers would not even begin to have this debate let alone do that.
- The position that I am trying to argue is one of compromise – yet for many people compromise is not on the agenda. Nothing less than the wholesale dismantling of the system is satisfactory. All or nothing attitudes while being principled might not in the long run be practical. I’m trying to propose a way for improving on the status quo, to make life better for readers – yet making that point apparently backfires because it is mis read as being an argument in favour of DRM. Some give is better than no give, right?
- In @2 Cory you outline some issues with creating interoperable DRM/escrow accounts. Agreed, it’s pretty hard and vested interests make it harder. I still think it’s a good idea that in theory could work well for everyone. In @1- there are some writers who we would never be allowed to release non-DRM due to external pressures.
-@4 I’m not convinced income is reliant on DRM, I said it can mitigate risk.
- @8 Joshua Back, your point about there been different segments of user is better way of saying what I am saying.
- @10 bowerbird, yes you are my bad spelling conscience. Sorry.
- @11 Paula you say that a publisher who uses DRM is not worthy of trust. Virtually all publishers are using DRM, I don’t think this means they are not worthy of trust it means they are subject to pressures to use it and believe, rightly or wrongly, that it is important in continuing to produce books. I would like to think no one in publishing is DRMing with the intentions you illustrate – perhaps I am wrong.I agree with you that releasing content on to the web is a great way of getting writing out in the world.
- @12 thanks for that!
- @13 Clay when I say the weight of industry opinion I mean the people who we buy the books from and the people who run the industry. We would not get the rights to publish many or most of our books if we abandoned DRM. We could try and make a stand, and then watch our authors and our lifeblood disappear elsewhere. Most people in the book world are not as open as yourself, Cory, David Hewson and Gary Gibson. As for our competition I would like to reiterate the point I made above – compared to our competition we are way ahead on offering options on DRM.
@14 Cory I’m not convinced the CD is quite the generative technology you make it out to be – iPods surely were driven by MP3s more than CDs, even if they work well with the CD? I recognise this doesn’t detract as such from your point re DVD DRM however.
@19 Sagodjur people have a mis conception of the health of the publishing industry…There is a valid point here that while digital and analog need not be co-terminous. But just because something is technically possible, does not mean that we should expect it to be so.
@tubejay saying DRM ebooks are an abomination is surely a bit strong? You are free to share books, yes. What I was trying to say is that you are generally not in a position to share a book with everyone you know. That is not contradicting a “simplest liberty”, it is trying to find a harmony between unfairly penalising the reader and unfairly penalising the content creator.
@24 Clay your argument here seems to be- the world has changed and copies can be made easily. Therefore we should accept the rightness of this. However just because something is possible does not make it correct. Of course we live in a world where frictionless reproduction is ever present; that doesn’t mean that in every instance we have to assume that it is good thing.
@27 I’m not sure I follow here…
@29 Clay when you say “your old ways of doing things” believe me, these are not my old ways of doing things! As I have tried to make clear, I am not a great old media pro-DRM advocate and to a great extent agree with what you are saying. Presented with that scenario, I am certainly on your side. What I would say is that I don’t think its such a binary choice, and that mixed modes, and various layers of control are not a “cop out” – rather it is a genuine way to address concerns from a range of stakeholders.
@33 Mark, haha I know…maybe we should put DRM on the blog…*strokes white cat, lights cigar, puts on pin stripe suit*
I’m a book reader. I would like to be an e-book reader but I will not pay for e-books with drm that I might not be able to use when I switch computer or that might not work with some new hardware a few years from now. You saying that it is “all good” means very little to me.
Basically I don’t trust you and I don’t trust drm. I see only one way for you to win me over and that is listening to Cory and Clay. Please make a produkt that I want to use!
“In @1- there are some writers who we would never be allowed to release non-DRM due to external pressures.”
You’re conflating the desire of agents, writers and editors with the requirements of readers: “there are some authors for whom this will not work as there audience isn’t right” suggests that readers don’t want to buy non-DRMed books. But what you’re *really* saying is, “We know the audience doesn’t want DRM, but maybe they can be coerced in accepting it because we can’t obtain a license to release without DRM.”
This is what I meant by “wishful thinking” when I commented on this post and the previous one. Just because the sell-side wants DRM, it doesn’t follow that the buy-side will accept it.
I refer you to the recent history of the music industry, who wasted a decade and more trying to find a mainstream audience for DRM, and who discovered to their dismay that all this accomplished was:
* More piracy from a disaffected audience who couldn’t buy what they wanted and so took it instead (many of these millions of customers will never return, and an entire generation has now grown up believing that only suckers buy music)
* Near-total control over the retail channel by a DRM vendor whom they have nearly no leverage over (Apple), whom they have had to go to great lengths to escape
As I said yesterday, you do publishing, Pan-Mac, writers and agents a disservice by playing along with this wishful thinking, because you simultaneously alienate readers from following you into the digital realm and give over vital control over your channels to DRM vendors to whom you will find yourself beholden.
“@4 I’m not convinced income is reliant on DRM, I said it can mitigate risk.”
Which risk? When has it done this?
“@14 Cory I’m not convinced the CD is quite the generative technology you make it out to be – iPods surely were driven by MP3s more than CDs, even if they work well with the CD? I recognise this doesn’t detract as such from your point re DVD DRM however.”
Where do you suppose the MP3s came from, if not ripped CDs? Remember, the iPod was in existence for half a decade before the Amazon MP3 Store launched.
“In @2 Cory you outline some issues with creating interoperable DRM/escrow accounts. Agreed, it’s pretty hard and vested interests make it harder. I still think it’s a good idea that in theory could work well for everyone”
Which theory? Where has it been successfully applied? I refer you back to Clay’s remarks about breathing under water and living to 130. There’s an important difference between, “It would be great if this was true” and “This would be great in theory.”
@Cory
Thanks for picking up the argument. (The point was: while I agree to dislike DRM for cultural reasons, I believe that Pan-Macmillan might have a point in asking for it, because it probably pays off.)
“the analogy to the App Store is flawed, since the iPhone is a platform on which *nothing except DRM’ed code* can be run.”
That is practically not the case. Jailbreaking the iPhone is quite easy, and currently almost ignored by Apple. This was true since the first iPhone appeared.
This way, Apple could cater both for “legitimist” customers that are unwilling to break any rule, for die-hard pirates that are willing to break any rule they don’t like, and for the many people inbetween. I think it is fair to argue that if the iPhone would be a DRMless, free platform, less money would be spent on apps and media. And if the DRM was unbreakable, or free media would be excluded, this would have made the platform less successful.
It is not a question of no DRM at all or everything DRMed, and it is not about making DRM unbreakable. It is all about shifting the balance towards bigger revenues for publishers. DRM is a balance-shifter, along with pricing and ease of access. If an AppStore app costs $2.99 and I have to try five slow torrent links before I get a good-enough pirated version, then I might just decide to just buy it. Even if the DRM is pesky.
“We have millions of text files, from emails to web-pages to PDFs to our shopping lists, and we want to read them on our ebook readers. If you try to sell an ebook reader that won’t let users load their own files on it, you will go broke.”
I totally agree. I would also prefer selling an eBook reader without any DRM at all. As it stands, many publishers will argue that DRM will prevent a sizeable segment of their target audiences from pirating stuff they would otherwise buy, and that this effect will outweight those customers that decide not to get the document because they can not buy a legit copy without DRM.
Before the publishers do not have data that shows that this argument is not true, I will probably go broke if I try to sell an eBook reader that does not support DRM at all – simply because I do not get to sell the content for it.
“Now, if you *do* allow users to load their own ebooks on the device, then the darknet hypothesis still holds. All you need to do to download a pirated book is search for it on Google”
There will probably always be a darknet, but if it is open, then it is also open to prosecution and poisoning. Many book warez sites have disappeared from the googleable net in the last two years, and legislators in the US, and especially here in Germany, are very intent on clipping the darker areas. (The current anti-child-porn laws are a red herring to mask the coming incursions.)
This does not mean that every pirate will turn into a customer, but it probably means that more potential customers do not go fishing in the darknet.
I would love to have an argument against that, because the all-or-nothing arguments are probably not going to sway all of the publishers. We need to show at least one of the following:
- Either total revenue of non-DRMed documents is higher than for DRMed documents
- Adoption of a completely DRM free platform would be so much larger that it compensates for losses due to additional piracy
- Existing and foreseeable DRM measures are all so flawed and expensive that the cost of implementing DRM is higher than the revenue gain
“That is practically not the case. Jailbreaking the iPhone is quite easy, and currently almost ignored by Apple. This was true since the first iPhone appeared.”
You’re conflating “possible” and “lawful.” Illegal ventures are necessarily underground and don’t attract funding, can’t advertise, etc.
“I will probably go broke if I try to sell an eBook reader that does not support DRM at all – simply because I do not get to sell the content for it.”
AOL made this argument about its content offerings. The Web proved it wrong. DVB has been trying to bring DRM to FTA television in Europe for years, unsuccessfully, and the much-threatened boycott of unencrypted television has not materialized.
Indeed, the audiobook publishers have banded together to demand that Audible open its store to non-DRMed versions of their offerings!
“If an AppStore app costs $2.99 and I have to try five slow torrent links before I get a good-enough pirated version, then I might just decide to just buy it. Even if the DRM is pesky…. Many book warez sites have disappeared from the googleable net in the last two years, and legislators in the US,”
This has nothing to do with DRM. The mere fact that bookwarez infringe copyright is sufficient legal basis to chase these sites offline; if there had been DRM on the files that ended up in bookwarez sites, it wouldn’t create any incremental vulnerability to attack by publishers. Likewise pirated App Store apps — the fact that these apps infringe is the reason that they are difficult to find, the fact that the iPhone is DRMed has nothing to do with it.
What DRM for the iPhone and Kindle achieves is ease in prosecuting competitors who might offer publishers a better deal (Apple v. Real, etc) — it has nothing to do with prosecuting pirates.
About Apple. Apple is the exception to all rules and is never a valid example. Unless you emply Steve Jobs but that seems unlikely.
http://www.buzzmachine.com/2009/01/29/30-days-of-wwgd-what-about-apple/
http://www.wired.com/techbiz/it/magazine/16-04/bz_apple
> “I will probably go broke if I try to sell an eBook reader that does not support DRM at all – simply because I do not get to sell the content for it.”
>
> AOL made this argument about its content offerings. The Web proved it wrong. DVB has been trying to bring DRM to FTA television in Europe for years, unsuccessfully, and the much-threatened boycott of unencrypted television has not materialized.
I am not a content rightsholder, but a hardware maker that has to convince existing content rightsholders to deliver their premium goods to my platform. If Adobe convinces the publisher to user Content Server 4, then I am stuck with it. And if a significant portion of documents in people’s harddisk library are in the Kindle format, I will have to support Kindle DRM too.
“What DRM for the iPhone and Kindle achieves is ease in prosecuting competitors who might offer publishers a better deal (Apple v. Real, etc) — it has nothing to do with prosecuting pirates.”
True for Apple, but probably not for Amazon, if they decide to freely license their DRM (which they hinted at). As a content aggregator, I will likely be able to provide some interoperability. It will cost me, and it will be a pain in the neck, both for me and the customer. Nonetheless, Amazon seems to be doing well despite locking people into their proprietary format. People are buying this stuff.
“True for Apple, but probably not for Amazon, if they decide to freely license their DRM (which they hinted at).”
Competition != licensing. If you get to choose who competes with you, you’re not competing.
“Nonetheless, Amazon seems to be doing well despite locking people into their proprietary format. People are buying this stuff.”
Audible is, but the Kindle has hardly turned publishing on its ear. What proportion of this year’s receipts at Bertellsmann or Hotlz will come from Kindle sales?
“What proportion of this year’s receipts at Bertellsmann or Hotlz will come from Kindle sales?”
There is no Kindle in Germany (they did not manage to convince T-Mob to give them a workable deal on mobile connectivity). But it seems that Amazon has sold a seven figure number of Kindles, and that the Kindle buyers are busily shopping Kindle format books. So: small emerging market, but already working well.
Bertelsmann and Holtzbrinck are very interested in eReaders and digital publishing. Growth in this sector is probably not going to be as rapid as we would hope, because readers are slower in adopting eInk than the gadget blogs. However, in the long run, I expect most p to migrate towards e. If that happens, the decision between lock-in DRM, somewhat open DRM, watermarking/social DRM and no DRM will be made according to empirical revenue data.
Anyway, please keep up the fight. No matter which approach is commercially more viable, I agree with you that DRM is a cultural evil, and technologically perverse. It is important to lobby legislators against the desire of existing business models to cripple our creative culture.
Fucking virgin media’s broken. now i’ve got no telly. bathed dogs so now i’m soaked. shandy stinks! it’s to hot. bad times all round.
@Michael Bhaskar
People bought ebooks for their Kindle with the function text-to-speech, after a while, publishers decided to stop that function on ebooks.
How can I trust this publishers?
Tomorrow they can tell me how many times I am allowed to read the ebook I bought.
Every publisher that uses DRM in his products wants to restrict something. Otherwise, he wouldn’t use it.
And every time he uses DRM, he is saying he doesn’t trust me. So, why should I trust him?
I can’t see any reason to trust a publisher who use DRM in his products. Can you give me one?
no, you’re not cheerleading- at the very least seem interested in an honest debate, and you’re right, most publishers would not allow such a question to go asked in a forum they hosted, (i think.) but some very good arguments (let’s assume that mine does not qualify) seem to fly over your head. rather than assume you are dense, i will give you the credit that anyone in this debate deserves- the possibility that from one perspective in this culture we’re building, some things are difficult to see no matter how intelligent you are.
the abomination i outlined is not in making books unsharable, although that is pretty abominable. rather the abomination is that any book with drm is a book that has the capability (however easily broken) of making itself inaccessible- of burning itself. books that censor themselves with technology (this is not just about copying a book, if you are familiar with the many forms of drm and what they limit) ARE an abomination. in a reasonable world, books cannot do that. if you make the issue only about copying, you ignore the extremely harmful side effects of drm- just as lessig with his anti-ddt is not pro-malaria, anti-drm is not pro-piracy argument.
people get get fined massive amounts and even go to jail for fair use, thanks to drm and the laws that support drm to get around the fact that idiots can break it. consider the detainment of russian programmer when the dmca was passed, all for creating a way to move his own books from one of his readers to another. not even a citizen of the united states, he was not allowed to return to his country. this is unconstitutional- the constitution limits copyright to protect the public, (place-shifting is fair use.) drm and the dmca (and similar) remove the constitutional limitations when law cannot directly (by nature.) that too, is an abomination.
perhaps there is a middle of the road or a compromise, but no amount of drm is “in the middle.” drm is very much an extreme, and like many extremes, it cannot be solved without dismantling some elements altogether. take northern ireland and the republic. to find a “middle road” with drm would be like saying… “well, you’re burning down shops- and if you could burn down half as many shops, that would be a good middle of the road.” no, there’s no room for setting shops (or books) on fire. first we must realize this business of drm can only harm the industry and consumers- not to mention the books themselves! then (like in the irish conflict) when we all get tired of books becoming unreadable and people disappearing (or in this case, getting sued for fair use) we can sit down and have a talk about this so-called “piracy.”
THAT’s a debate worth finding the middle of the road on. i don’t think it will be about “some drm,” but rather how much “illegal” copying of drm-free books the publishing industry can tolerate. for many publishers it will be none- but that’s not the middle of the road, is it? because we did loan out SOME books in the past. that wasn’t a lost sale- it was a fair use- at least it was then, (and libraries are still guilty of this “crime.”) the extreme is piracy, THE OTHER EXTREME IS DRM. and fair use is the middle of the road- but drm won’t have that middle, as cory mentioned.
I Love books and I buy many.
I love owning them so much so that I am no longer a member of a public library, because I would much rather own and be able to lend out, or gift, or set free (http://www.bookcrossing.com/) or just treasure and use as referance in my own art for years to come. I have a large collection of pdf’s many nay most of them are copies of physical books I either own or have owned at some time, and are kept for quick searching of quotes, specific passages that I love etc.
I love giving books as gifts.
I am Australian and am still eagerly waiting for a real ebook reader to arrive on our shores. However, I will not Ever be purchasing DRM’d ebooks.
They simply are not worth it- http://xkcd.com/488/ -
Beyond all this is a really simple reason your company should be actively encouraging all your authors to abandon the drm’d model;
Gifts, books are the perfect gift, and untill I can give a friend or loved one a copy of a book, confident in the knowledge that it will be thiers to keep forever, that they will not have to agree to a 20,000 word abusive EULA, that they will not have to install dubious security breaching rootkit software, that the recipient can read it wherever whenever and on any device they choose, I will not even consider purchasing the product. Simply there is no price point low enough. Unless publishers alter this approach the industry as it is will not survive my lifetime.
Here’s why DRM is important: it can be used to facilitate the RESALE of digital content. Let’s call it Digital Resale Management.
Why do I necessarily have to purchase an author’s writings from a recognised ebook retailer when they can sell it to me, and more importantly, why do my friends need to buy it from said retailer when they could buy it directly from me? What matters is that everyone in the value chain is paid: the author; publisher; wholesaler/distributor; and yes, even me for reselling those works.
I recognise anti-DRMers are opposed to locks and keys and rightly so, but some of the arguments are as overly zealous as those made by pro-DRMers. Having worked in and around the music business for the better part of the past decade I’ve heard all these arguments before and I’m really surprised we’re still having this debate.
So yes, locks and keys aka DRM has already failed, but no DRM means no resale. It is definitely time to move the debate beyond linear distribution channels!
Michael Bhaskar, good on you for stepping where others fear to tread. Get in touch, I’ve got a business proposition for you
Your new invaluable guideline indicates a whole lot to me and extremely more to my mates.
politics aside, getting rid of DRM would probably be good for Apple.
Rattling good info can be found on web blog .
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[...] here to read the rest: Round 2: DRM Is Not Totally 100% Evil But Sometimes Gets Close… Wednesday, July 15th, 2009 at 22:50 Tags: album-having, also-reports, and-mature, from-your, [...]
[...] thedigitalist.net » Round 2: DRM Is Not Totally 100% Evil But Sometimes Gets Close… [...]
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[...] Digitalist blog, which resulted in the (predictable) slew of comments. Michael has now posted a response which has garnered another slew of comments. It’s all worth reading if you can summon the [...]
[...] this came after a rollicking debate on ebook DRM on Pan Macmillan (UK)’s The Digitalist blog, wherein publishers, technologists, [...]
[...] this came after a rollicking debate on ebook DRM on Pan Macmillan (UK)’s The Digitalist blog, wherein publishers, technologists, [...]
[...] this came after a rollicking debate on ebook DRM on Pan Macmillan (UK)’s The Digitalist blog, wherein publishers, technologists, [...]
[...] debate last week on The Digitalist by having the audacity to suggest that DRM might not be all bad (twice), is having second thoughts: When I wrote the piece I was perhaps slightly self consciously [...]
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[...] has been an interesting debate concerning DRM happening over at Pan Macmillan’s blog the digitalist, whereby digital editor Michael Bhaskar [...]
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