Can you imagine someone trying to start public libraries if they didn't already exist now? I think it's safe to say it would never ever happen, at least in the US. Between lobbying and the general disdain for most things run by any type of government here, they'd never have a chance.
Luckily we still have places that still purchase printed books (along with ebooks) and you can go borrow them any time and they never stop working.... just ignore the damage from fire, water, rips, loss, bed bugs... maybe they do actually stop working for other reasons now that I think about it :-)
If we merely had the same copyright we had when the country first formed, this entire "your books turn off thing" would possibly be completely acceptable: a subset of works would be onerous and somewhat annoying for 28 years, after which you could literally do whatever you want with them. Key here is that this means that within your lifetime this would quite possibly be the case. This also means that a very large variety of still-somewhat-recent works would be public domain, and thus creating tools to read them would be profitable. Right now, a "public domain" Kindle would be for what, works that are over a hundred years old or something? Few people will ever encounter public domain works they want to read so it's as if everything fits the rent model.
The crazy thing is that everything is more amenable to "sharing" today, it is merely legal structure that prevents it now. Arguably the true utility of a library is that it would be (or would have been) absurd to duplicate a physical book for every person that wants it, and then when no one was actively reading them they'd take up a crazy amount of space. This is still true today! This world should be strictly better than the past. But instead we have nostalgia for libraries, not due to any essential reason, but because we've created an artificial environment where it is more appealing to potentially wait for a copy of something to become available vs. instantly duplicating it.
It could be longer than 100 years. I recently tried to find a copy of an article published in 1932. I can't find any version online and the nearest print version is in a library 1,000 km away. I asked the library if they could scan it and email it to me and they said no, it's still covered by copyright. This work was published early in the author's life; she died in 1983. So the Berne Convention would protect this work for 101 years after publication, and the domestic copyright will last for 121 years. I will be in my 60s before the copyright expires on a work published when my grandfather was born.
Well I can’t even read my own research paper (lost my tex source and final digital copy when both hard drive and backup drive failed within the same hour). I know for a fact that it is archived and basically exactly where but it’s beyond either one of an abusive layer of bureaucracy or a paywall, whichever I would choose to go through. Not that it’s worthy of anything or even remotely interesting but it tells a lot about the absurdity of it all.
This idea that the original authors of the source code don't have any right to that source code (they're not even listed as authors most of the time), seems like a contradiction. If copyright is so important, why is it so easily stripped from its authors in some fields?
It makes more sense when you understand that copyright was hardly ever about protecting authors, but about protecting the interests of the more powerful middlemen.
I think it fits in with the general idea of factories where you work for a salary and the work product you produce isn’t something you can take away. The problem with words or code is they are easy to copy, so one could easily make a copy and take it away. I guess that’s why they make you sign away the copyright
The factory analogy is pretty good. Profit doesn't really goes to the workers, it goes to the owners. And one critical property of capitalism is that owners and workers aren't the same people at all.
Having programmers sign off their copyright has the same effect as classical capitalism: it separates whoever owns the code from whoever works on it. The owners can then enjoy the full royalties, while the programmers are limited to their salaries —just like the factory workers.
Factory workers could walk away with the fruits of their labour, if only they owned the factory. Programmers could walk away with the fruits of their labour, if only they retained the rights to them. And in my opinion, they both should. The means of production should be owned by the workers, not the capitalists.
If on the other hand you agree with capitalism, it makes perfect sense to have programmers sign away their rights.
> when both hard drive and backup drive failed within the same hour
That is basically the horror scenario of backup'ing, since you don't usually protect against that kind of failure: the probability of it happening just seems too low. It's similar to having a limit to your attack model when securing your data/accounts/... against attacks: you can try to protect against a governmentally funded cyber attack on you personally, but you probably won't succeed and it's very surely not worth the trouble if you're not a very influential or otherwise important person.
In this case, the usual retort would of course be "why didn't you have a backup in 'the cloud'?" I have for part of my stuff, but not for all. I feel you.
I knew about that and tried beforehand to see if I needed to put a warning, but it doesn't trigger anymore for me so I thought this article was exempt, or he removed it. Maybe it's Safari that properly strips the referer.
The article is Joan Robinson, 'Economics is a serious subject: the apologia of an economist to the mathematician, the scientist and the plain man' (1932). It's footnote 1 in Coase's 'The nature of the firm,' which I was prompted to read in more depth by a recent HN comment, so it's not an especially obscure document! The university library I spoke to does do inter-library loans, but I need to find a local library that will take one out for me. I haven't got around to doing that since I moved states 18 months ago, and I'm no longer affiliated with a local university. It's a pain, but something I probably would have resolved sooner if there weren't so many books digitised in the various proprietary databases!
> If we merely had the same copyright we had when the country first formed, this entire "your books turn off thing" would possibly be completely acceptable: a subset of works would be onerous and somewhat annoying for 28 years, after which you could literally do whatever you want with them
Also, the US didn't respect any other country's copyrights or patents so anything published outside the US would be free immediately.
>>>a subset of works would be onerous and somewhat annoying for 28 years, after which you could literally do whatever you want with them.
Unfortunately, what would probably happen is more like what is happening to video games now; they are no longer profitable to publish, don't exist in an easy-to-backup, easy-to-share format (like an epub file with no DRM, for example), and so are essentially lost to time. If an ebook that no one can access is suddenly in the public domain, that doesn't help anyone one iota.
The AAA-class games with a budget of a blockbuster movie? Well, I'm fine with them following the movie locked-up route.
New and original indie games? New Portal? New Monument Valley? Maybe even new Doom? I bet they would live with shorter copyright; Doom was released as free software much sooner than after 28 years.
Surely then you want them in the public domain sooner to prevent that. Sourcing a 28 year old pc to read some 'ancient' format is workable. Finding a 100+ year old pc to do the same seems less workable.
If/when Stadia and the like take off, and streaming-only games appear, we can forget about that too.
By the way, this is just one of the many reasons why I think that streamed games are very much an anti-consumer move and should not be paid for in any circumstance, to prevent normalization.
That could easily be extended to "streamed media" in general - or, more accurately, Media as a Service. Going further, Software as a Service - or at least the part that falls under FSF's "Service as a Software Substitute" (SaaSS) - is an anti-consumer move too. Related, the trend of tying physical products to Internet services in a blatant attempt to turn ownership into renting is a hugely popular and a hugely anti-consumer practice too.
Some anecdata to counter that idea: A significant part of German movie piracy is done through streaming as it allows the uploaders to monetize through ads.
Hm, interesting. I always assumed people making money on these streaming services (through both ads and premium accounts) aren't the same people as those who upload movies to them (actually, to somewhere else; these services now aggregate links to players, mostly).
I believe they're more popular than Torrents because they shield from responsibility. At least over here at Poland, your legal problems only start when you're actually infringing copyright - reproducing the work, i.e. uploading - which makes Torrents risky, but HTTP streaming fully in the clear for the viewers.
It took the richest guy in the world funding them like crazy to start them. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Carnegie#3,000_public_l... The one in Philadelphia cost the equivalent of $15,000,000 - and that didn't include the land, operation, or maintenance.
The yearly ALA (American Library Association) conference was in the conference center across the street from that library last weekend. I wonder how many noticed the metaphor to what is happening to libraries in general?
To be fair, it’s not like DC doesn’t have public libraries. Also, the original DC Carnegie building sits on some of the most expensive real estate in the country.
Different countries obviously have very different founding myths about this.
Here in the UK it took the Public Libriaries Act to start them - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_Libraries_Act_1850 - Andrew Carnagie would have been 15 years old at that point, having only recently migrated to the US with his parents, due to grinding poverty back home.
Exactly, dead tree books aren't a solution. I mean if a tiny library at my home or town burns up, there would be serious loss of a unique collection with that too!
IMO, a more robust and resilient solution would be to bring native experience of books on the web. And tie it up with open source and paid model both in two separate states: of a manuscript and that of a book. If a processor of books dies (like in this case Microsoft), there'd still be a manuscript to fork and re-process into book again through an alternate channel. That's my 2 cents.
Personally I find that I just don't get as much out of digital books. I'm not sure exactly what it is, but the closest I can describe is that it feels like I'm looking through a window at a book rather than actually viewing it directly.
I found that for certain types of books, digital works fine, while for others it is a disaster. For novels, poems, and other non-textbook books without tons of graphics, ebooks are great. For textbooks or other materials where you are expected to flip back and forth through pages trying to digest the material, as well as for books with tons of graphs and diagrams, ebooks are indeed suboptimal.
My personal rule is that I read most of the books in digital, and then buy a hard copy if I end up liking the book a lot. This way I don't have shelves filled with a ton of dead tree books that occupy precious space in my dwelling, I have all the books I care and love in a physical format that will never go away or get DRMd, and the authors (of the books I ended up liking) get rewarded more than if I just bought a single digital or a physical copy.
P.S. Same for me with music. Listening to a ton of stuff in digital, buying vinyls and concert tickets for artists I end up liking a lot.
> For novels, poems, and other non-textbook books without tons of graphics, ebooks are great.
E-readers suck for poetry. They are often incapable of maintaining the same graphic layout that the poet had in mind when creating the poems. Even when the poet is not one of those poets who intentionally makes the visual formatting a part of his work, e-readers cannot display the text according to the conventions for breaking lines that have been around for ages. Some poetry ebooks are in fact preceded by a publisher’s warning to this effect.
Agreed generally, but this one is on the publisher or whoever is in charge of making a digital copy. I was recently reading some of Bukowski poems on kindle, and the "weird" formatting intended by the author was relayed just as well in digital as it was in paper.
Interestingly, I find I'm the other way. Reading for pleasure, I want a physical book. Anything where I'm flipping back and forth, I prefer an e-book, so I can quickly make bookmarks and have a clickable table of contents/index.
Relative niceness of ebook vs. physical book depends a lot on the actual ebook hardware. i.e. An ereader is much nicer than a tablet/PC for reading text, but nearly unusable if you need to flip around or do anything interactive other than turning pages from front to back.
For me textbooks are best consumed as a pdf. I don't kill my back, I don't kill my wallet, and I can ctrl-f through the entire book and annotate as needed. I throw it on a flashdrive on my keys and I can pass it around to classmates.
Any other kind of book and I'm reaching for print. It's much more satisfying to bang out 50 pages in a novel and see the bookmark move deeper into the book than to scroll scroll scroll through an ebook.
I find the opposite. If I just want to read, I prefer a book. If it's a text, I want to be able to read and search, and I want to be able to scale the graphs and footnotes. Not all eBook formats support color and scaling, but some do.
It's nice although our preferences are reversed to find someone else who has preferences for both in different circumstances.
I really like the books that include an eBook with the print copy.
It's the interface and interaction of physical books which is lost.
I can keep my hand between two sections and flip between them, insert colored post-its, or bokmarks or index cards. Dog-ear pages, make marginal notes, star, underline, or (shudder)highlight.
The one thing missing is full-text search, though a good index is a 90% solution (and so: not optional).
Text and other element placement is static, so spatial memory works. Fluid layout is great for screens, but lousy for recall.
And the interface is consistent across books, authors, publishers, and centuries. Whilst, yes, various ebook formats offer facsimiles of many of these features, they are just that, and mediated to bot. Want to highlight? Better hope that's a rendered or OCRd (and reliably) PDF, or you're SooL.
Source; A tablet with over 5,000 epub-type docs, of various sources and provenance, from single page to multi-volume book length. I appreciate the weight and space savings, but miss much physical books deliver.
I remember roughly how far into a book, or chapter, passages are. Where on a page, or with relstion to other elements, how or where a line breaks (especially if that's awkward). Where the book itself lives within my collection. Where I was when first reading (or later re-reading) it. Etc., etc.
Spatial associations.
Consistent pagination is useful, but it's a small subset of the whole.
I generally print out research articles because I can write all over the figures and take it with me to lunch and not be bothered when I spill on it, or fold it up into my back pocket. I feel like I get better comprehension too. For textbooks that's a no go for me and probably most students, because this thing is getting resold once I'm through.
I agree with this sentiment when using a paperwhite tablet (glowing screens with stuff formatted for paper is painful). Serial reading, ebooks are fine.
There are a few cases where a PDF/djvu textbook with strategic bookmarks can also be used. When I'm on the road I have a decent reference library in a rooted Kobo H2O running koreader. Not an ideal solution; something with an 8x12 screen would be much closer to it, but nobody makes these any more, and if I need to look something up in Golub, it can be done.
FWIIW the only thing that makes this doable is koreader does reflow on columnated text.
I find retaining information in digital books much more difficult. I think the lack of a tactile third dimension when reading eliminates a search index in my memory and it really effects how I parse the book. I tried reading the most recent GoT book in digital form and I just could not keep track of everyone (admittedly it had been several years since I read the previous installment in dead tree form, so I didn't have a current index of all the characters fresh in my memory). I gave up about 1/4 of the way through and just watched the tv show :)
Honestly, and I dislike admitting it, but paper books instill the same feeling as any other "collection" hobby for me. I take more pride in reading them knowing that my bookshelf is growing.
Fair point. I agree that the incumbent digital avatar is more of a file and less of a book, a classic enterprise solution for a consumer category of products.
And yes, experience of relaxed intake with page turns in between does open a portal to another dimension!
> Between lobbying and the general disdain for most things run by any type of government here,
I’ve grown to distain the government because of how often it pushes strict bills like DMCA which are quickly out-of-date and ripe for abuse.
It’s not just lobbying congress either, there have been some very strict cases coming out of prosecutors offices such as the case against MIT student David LaMacchia in 1994 who put files up on an encrypted BBS. Which resulted in congress passing a bill to fix a “loophole” where people uploading files on the internet without any commercial intent couldn’t be sent to jail. So the bill (predating DMCA by a couple of years) allowed up to 5yrs +$250k fines for online piracy, regardless of commercial intent:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._LaMacchia
Every subreddit or Youtube channel or whatever online community I’ve been a part of has had to deal with people abusing DMCA takedown notices and having things that clearly fall under fair use, or even the person’s own content, being taken down.
> Every subreddit or Youtube channel or whatever online community I’ve been a part of has had to deal with people abusing DMCA takedown notices
Are you sure you've seen DMCA abuse on YouTube? They have their own system for handling alleged copyright violation that has little to do with the DMCA takedown procedure, and almost all complaints I've seen about abuse on Google have been due to that system.
> They have their own system for handling alleged copyright violation that has little to do with the DMCA takedown procedure
That system is such a scourge. No fair use, no distinction between different countrie's legislations, no appeal.
If you make an educational video, no matter how much effort and skill you put in, if you use some musical excerpt or images or scene, it doesn't matter how short it is, or what you're using it for. Your video will be "claimed", and any add revenue you used to have will go to whoever owns the rights to the excerpt. And if you didn't enable ads, the claim will do it anyway.
I wonder what happens when you use 2 excerpts from different major copyright holders…
> I wonder what happens when you use 2 excerpts from different major copyright holders…
That is a technique that's been used in the past, though I'm not sure if it's still effective. As far as I know, it was popularized by Jim Sterling who named it the "copyright deadlock"[0].
Eh, Google's system is born out of a compromise because of the DMCA. Simply put most large publishers dropped their suits and do not file actual complaints with this compromise.
Ok, but if it wasn't for private interests pushing those laws, I really doubt a government would pass them. So saying that it's the government fault is true, but not the whole picture. You should feel disdain for both the government and the lobbies, if you have a problem with absurd copyright laws.
The whole point of his comment is that the government is what's enabling that kind of lobbying. There's no such thing as a government that is free of private interests pushing for their preferred policies; the closest you can even get to that is strict constitutional limits, restricting what the government can do in the first place. (And even those seem to have failed quite badly in the case of copyright or patent protection, which were originally supposed to be "limited in time" and to promote knowledge and the useful arts - none of which is the case today!)
My library has the option of "checking out" ebooks. They will "purchase" them and have a set "number of copies". I put all of these things in quotes as I'm not sure how its handled for essentially a digital file vs a physical paper book, or how the author/publisher/etc makes money in this deal.
That's plain naked rentseeking. I'd get them charging a nominal sum to prevent abuse (like "why I'd buy any books if I can just check out everything for free in the library" - virtually nobody ever says that but maybe they're afraid of it) but $55 is way over the cost of an average book, let alone ebook, and expiring them makes zero sense since popular book stops bringing substantial income quite soon so they literally lose nothing allowing the library to keep it.
It's surely competitive with physical books, including the cost of storing and handling them, otherwise libraries wouldn't buy them. A random on the internet says about library books: "Very popular hardcover books have a lifespan of around 20 circulations, which is around a year or less, depending on how well bound they are and how well the patrons treat them." Other books are regularly thrown away because they're not popular enough. So I presume publishers account for the short life of a library book in their pricing, and if they actually lasted forever, they'd cost more.
Having seen some of the contracts -- there are publishers which sell them with a lifetime measured in reads, and others with a lifetime measured in years (and you buy N copies), and a very very few who don't impose a lifetime.
In all cases the author gets paid through whatever royalty arrangements they made with the publisher -- but that might contain a lower or zero payment for library and/or educational purchases.
The idea is that a physical book has a lifetime before it has to be discarded due to wear, so they want the e-book to be the same. I think that's dumb, and don't feel we need to be tied to the durability of paper books, but that's their justification.
I think most libraries offering this are doing it through Hoopla. It works fine though you can only play them in a browser and the video quality is roughly at the level of a DVD.
As I understand it, the number of copies is enforced using DRM (which isn’t the best, of course), but the books are free and there’s usually a pretty wide selection.
I'm super, super grateful to our public libraries and the amazing resources they offer— coming from an immigrant farm-laboring family in a tiny (<1000 population) town, our equally tiny library introduced me to computers in the 8th grade (which later got me in trouble for, um, "exploring" our police and school district's networks) thanks in part to a grant they received by the Gates Foundation. I wouldn't have the career I do now, or honestly even been aware of it, if it were not in part due to it.
My local library now is much, much more well endowed with resources from different media types and they're even getting a makerspace soon! I thankfully can afford my own books and toys to play with, but as a father of 2 young boys, I make sure we utilize the library often and even volunteer our time teaching the occasional workshop on new media/tech/design.
I think they're woefully underutilized and I'd be worried that they'd start to go away.
Much of the material on LibGen would be legally accessible under the copyright terms in which it was originally published, but that their exclusivity has been retroactively extended.
Meh, as long as their servers aren't in those countries, they can't do anything except censor the website. And most countries with long copyright terms don't censor websites.
If they did not have servers in Germany couldn't they have just ignored the lawsuit?
They can make it illegal for Germans to use the site if they wish, but they can't go meddling in foreign media content. If Saudi Arabia serves you a lawsuit because you have a picture of a woman's face on a webpage without hijab, would you fly there to go to court? I'd just trash their lawsuit and never go there. They can block my site if they want -- same goes for Germany.
They explain all this in the notice I linked above:
...
Because PGLAF operates as a legitimate non-profit organization, however, it is appropriate to act as the German Court ordered - pending appeal - even though it disagrees with the order.
...
The decision to acceed to the German Court's order to make items inaccessible from Germany is intended to be a temporary appeasement, while the appeal occurs - this is because the German appeal Court will likely look disfavorably on PGLAF if it shows contempt for the German Court. Ultimately, PGLAF seeks to establish that any complaints about copyright must be brought either to the US Courts (where PGLAF operates) or WIPO processes (as guided by international treaties).
That's one of my go-to examples as well. I mean, even excluding porn and soft porn, the vast majority of Western media is likely illegal in Saudi Arabia.
I'm able to hold any book online so as soon as I hear about a book I place a hold on it. They have most books even new ones and if not I can request it for free through all libraries in North California.
I stop by the library once a week and pick up all the holds of that week (typically 3-4). I love to have the physical medium around.
I typically renew my loans 2 or 3 times and as such I keep the books close to 3 months. It allows me to fully read the ones I find interesting and just go over quickly the ones I don't care about.
Once a month I bring back all the books I got.
And all of this is completely free. I love my local libraries and cannot believe it took me that long to find out about this wonderful service.
From now on I go out of my way to never buy a single book again and avoid all DRM and other nonsensical digital medias like that.
On the flip side, people all over my neighborhood have put considerable effort into building awesome tiny sharing libraries. Perhaps without the issue being "solved" we'd see even more and varied institutions formulate organically.
So yes, I can imagine, but who knows whose imagination is closer to "alternative reality"?
Tiny Libraries are cool but they aren’t even a pale shadow of traditional public libraries that come with commitments to levels of service and access to people of all backgrounds and locations and incomes.
Sure, but in a community where there wasn't an actual public library, I do believe one would inevitably come into existence as the effort of the community, in the same way those tiny libraries do. "People have spare books; community centres exist; so why not put the spare books in the community centre?"
In the alternate reality where public libraries didn't already exist, I suspect the law would make it illegal to loan books. It would be a direct response to these small informal libraries trying to share books and "violate the license."
But you'll be constrained to the old spare books of that particular community.
Public libraries have a much broader selection, and they also buy new books.
Also I'm not sure they'd actually come into existence everywhere, even if the internet is a poor substitute for a library it is cheaper and may be enough for many.
Very possibly, yes. The original modern libraries in the west were effectively subscription libraries, as in, they weren’t free to use, you had to pay to become a member. It was only later that they were run by the government. That said, there is a vast gulf between them and a little box people put outside their homes with some books inside.
Insofar as copyright owners are empowered by the system currently in place (e.g. DMCA) a system with less authoritarian power available to lobbyists may have the exact opposite effect. Same caveats as above apply.
Do you use these libraries? I see them around from time to time, but I've never been tempted to borrow from them. Usually there's nothing more than a random selection of popular novels from the last 20 years.
I wasn't really trying to make a qualitative point, but to that notion I have had considerable trouble in some public libraries as well.
The first memory I have of a library was in school where I wanted desperately to find out how one "writes" software. After lots of probably very annoying begging, I was given a book on either COBOL or FORTRAN from the ~60s. It wasn't super helpful.
The last book I borrowed (Alan Cooper's The Inmates are Running the Asylum on UX design, which I found compelling) was lost after I dropped it in the bin. I was fined $104, and upon contacting them was given customer service rivaling comcast's. Until I pay that ridiculous cost I can't borrow from any city library, and can't get a card anywhere else that I'm not a resident. So for me, the tiny libraries are already way over a very low bar.
I've had some generally good experiences, too, but nothing that's convinced me that the current model is either the only way or the best way.
> The last book I borrowed (Alan Cooper's The Inmates are Running the Asylum on UX design, which I found compelling) was lost after I dropped it in the bin.
This frustrates me no end. After several such incidents, and comparable customer service, I now take pictures of myself returning the books. I'm sure it'll do no good when it comes down to it, but it lets me feel that I have some agency in the matter.
What really frustrates me is that our library just re-jiggered its return system so that it's metered, counting how many resources have been returned, perhaps in an effort to address (for them if not for me) concerns like this; but there's still no way to get a receipt indicating that you have returned any particular resource. When I try to get one from the front-desk staff by returning it in person, I'm told I have to drop it in the metered chute and, basically, hope.
the only reason they exist now is because they're grandfathered in. We could have the exact same thing, just digitally, but due to copyright that will never happen.
The state I'm from has its libraries funded by the county (not sure if that's true elsewhere in the US). the more people in a county, the greater property tax base, and thus the greater (potential) for public library funding. So theoretically there's no reason they can't cut or reduce their physical presence and publish their entire library online. Except instead of knowledge, it's now "content", and instead of readers, its now "consumers". Everything is a "market" that needs to be "captured" and libraries are a threat to this corporate model. From a purely informational standpoint, pages-bound-with-glue are just low-tech forms of hardware dongles.
At the risk of sounding too conservative for HN, this 'grandfathering' is an invaluable means of insulating societal infrastructure from the tyranny of cultural value shift.
Maybe some of it is that. But a lot of traditional rights of the general public are too easily overcome by dedicated funded interests via lawmakers and regulators.
Like or hate trump, but his "to make a new regulation, you first need to repeal two regulations" thing was pretty interesting.
I think there need to be more checks and balances than simple grandfathering architected into things when rights are lost.
general disdain for most things run by any type of government here
Why should that have anything to do with it? Government-run libraries are a much more recent development - the first libraries in America were set up by the churches, and later became private entities such as Ben Franklin's Library Company of Philadelphia.
Just because it's good for some people or used to be worthwhile doesn't mean it's good overall that it exists. If you could buy a cheap license for time limited access to DRMd copy of any book, to me, that would be better than a library because it would be cheaper in principle, as long as copyright owners cooperated and it didn't suffer from monopolies and things, and far more books would be available to far more people without the physical constraints.
My library does that but the range is quite small and I guess they're paid for by the local government instead of the readers, which doesn't seem right. Shouldn't private goods be paid for by the users and public goods paid for by government? It's good that information is freely available to the public, but we now have the internet for most of that, and physical books would always be more expensive than ebooks so the financial burden on individuals would have been higher long ago when public libraries started before even paperbacks existed.
And who is to say you can even open the file? Not many ebooks are being written in plain text or pdf after all. Usually it's something clunky and proprietary with DRM.
Yes, this. I'm surprised they're not labeled as scary "socialism" and replaced with public-private "partnerships" with commercial ads, membership fees and overpriced concessions. It seems the public commonwealth is being cannibalized for vampiric exploitation at every opportunity. You can't sit down anywhere, because it's been replaced with a sterile multi-use zoned commercial areas with a Code of Conduct* without buying something. Remember water fountains and public parks? Not anymore.
*I ate at this food truck in Austin that was in a mixed-use commercial area that had a 12 term CoC. These places typically have control-freak power-trip mall (wannabe) cops.
Today libraries would be decried as socialist, when in fact they are a public good. The idea of a public good is malleable, so perhaps the way for left leaning policy makers to advance certain types of legislation is through re-branding as a public good.
This isn't the first time this kind of thing has happened, either. Amazon, before they introduced the Kindle, used Adobe DRM for ebooks. I lost a book I'd bought through them when they switched to Kindle.
The thing that really gets me is I had to register my book to buy it, with my email address. They had my address, and couldn't even be bothered to send me an alert, telling me that the DRM servers were being decommissioned, so if I wanted to license any new computers to use the book I should do so then.
I've not been able to replace that book either, so it's not like the refund they finally begrudgingly gave me could be put towards a replacement - that book has never been republished in any form that I have been able to find (Vinge's annotated version of his book A Fire Upon the Deep).
I have 300+ books purchased and read on iOS Kindle, after buying Neal Stephenson's latest recently I discovered it has an obnoxious popover Audible ad on the page browse screen which must be re-dismissed each time you open the book. I was shocked how quickly it totally ruined the experience of reading a book. I haven't read more than about 10 pages on Kindle since, and I can't bear to buy another kindle book knowing this could happen at any time. It has been a couple weeks, it is probable at this point I will never read another book on Kindle (the only device I care about is iOS). I had sort of the opposite reaction, if there is some other entity mediating my experience with the text, I genuinely don't care what happens to my "library". Luckily these are mass produced and distributed books that are essentially immutable, so it isn't like I've lost anything that isn't available elsewhere.
It isn't uncommon for books to promote other books before/after the content, but something about having it in the page movement is so distracting. And it is slow to load in, meanwhile it is just a big white square blocking the book title with an animated spinner.
There isn't any company I would "trust" to provide an uniformly excellent experience so I don't really hold it against Amazon in toto, I still think their ability to do the long tail of retail is excellent. I didn't refund the book because I still borrowed it and read it, and I feel that the author and publisher still deserve their share since they've done nothing wrong.
Actually he 'rented' the book as well. Some years ago companies all found they could use the TOS against us for digital purchases. His 'purchase' was actually a license to view X content on Y devices Z times.
This enrages me as they charge us money for a virtual good which as soon as we purchase is considered worthless by the selling company. They can ban you- effectively closing your account and blocking your access to your 'purchases', or they can, as discussed here, decide to remove your purchase for 'insert_reason' without making you whole. This incentivizes companies toward hostile consumer attitudes in the name of profit.
Don't worry. You're a second class netizen with a VPN too. You'll just spend half your time solving Google's ReCaptcha instead of being blocked outright.
...This isn't the first time this kind of thing has happened, either...
This is technically the 3rd time, with just Microsoft alone.
They turned off eBook authentication servers for "Microsoft Reader" (.LIT) format years ago... (2012?) Then, after they launched their also-now-dead store on Windows Phone which had some eBooks, well... that went away too...
Next - how many subscription/Music services has Microsoft launched and then abandoned? More than one, but I remember: PlaysForSure" - DRM servers turned off 11 years ago...
So - unless it is Xbox, don't think Microsoft is going to be a reliable source for your digital media.
I am interested in how authors actually work, and the annotated version gives some insight into how he works. You can get an idea of how he works by reading this interview with him [1]. I also got some of this from another interview I cannot find at the moment, but basically he writes in Emacs, just a plain text file, but with some markup conventions that let him distinguish between the text itself and various comments to himself about the text.
The interview I linked to includes a screenshot of Children in the Sky whilst he was writing it. The character of the draft you see there is much like I remember this annotated edition of A Fire Upon the Deep was - in other words, it was really the text of the book itself but including all of the notes to himself that he put in to help himself correlate bits of the story that should be correlated, help him make sure that the first time various things are introduced he actually introduces them properly, includes feedback from his early readers, etc.
I would not actually read the annotated version when I wanted to read the book, but would read it to see his thought process at various points, how he decided to do things, etc.
I am also very curious! A Fire Upon the Deep, in my opinion, is one of the best books ever written. The idea of the "zones" really fascinates me, I wish Vinge did more with it.
I wouldn't rank it among the best ever written, but fascinating enough in its own right. I've read it several times, and loaned/given it to friends too. Now I'm wondering about the annotated edition!
My grandmother is in her late 90s, has dementia, and is in a care home. My mother sent me this update last week:
> Went to see Granny yesterday, was quite cheerful, read though the poems in "When we were very young"[0], her original copy[1], given to her in 1928, how about that. She knows them off by heart and joins in when you read them to
her
Q: When we're in our late 90s, how many of us will be able to consume 90-year-old-content that way?
I love reading. I resisted ebooks until we had a baby at which point my reading time shrank to situations (bed w/the lights out, on the bus) where my Kindle is more convenient than a paper book. I buy/acquire ebooks that are the sort of thing I'd probably purchase, read, and then sell. For books I think (or know) I want to keep, I buy a paper copy, even if I've gotten an e-copy. I want my kids to have lots of book around, not _an extensive ebook library_. There's too much joy in happening across a new book at random on the shelf; Amazon recommendations can never recreate or supplant that.
I much prefer real books but after having a baby it's just impossible to have two hands for reading during what now counts as reading time. Now it's mostly 0 hands where I just balance the reader on something.
And that is why I still buy my all my music. Digitally, but lossless, DRM-free and forever mine. Another concern to me is the limited selection on streaming services, particularly when it comes to rare and old releases.
I've been hoping this nostalgia trend will end. It's time to move forward. Instead of teaching kids about Shakespeare, we should be teaching about Super Mario for cultural history. Why should anyone care about poems or poetry? It was the entertainment of the early-print society, it has comparably little value today.
Unfortunately schools often fail to teach the message behind the works we view as classics.
Shakespeare wrote not just to entertain, but to inform and comment on what was happening at the time. Unfortunately many teachers don't do a good job, or don't have the time, to explain the background of the works. Students often don't know or understand that his works were often directed at specific royalty or other influential people. And so when we first read his works, we don't get the insults, slights, and compliments that would have been obvious to people back then.
Other classics speak about what it is to be human, and evoke imagery that most works never manage. What we consider to be the classics are only a small percentage of novels, poetry, and essays created in their time. There are works being written today that will become classics, but they have to be shown to be meaningful to future generations, just like the current classics have.
There are some games telling wonderful stories, and maybe they'll come to be regarded as classics in their own right. But the Super Marios, Warcrafts, and even Assassin's Creeds are not going to be among them. They're pioneers in their own right, but they don't actually have anything to teach us about the human condition, politics of their day, or have a timelessness that help towards enlightenment.
We should treasure poetry and literature because it's about the experience of reading, just like video games are about the experience of playing. Describing Super Mario Bros (You jump on, over, and around things, sometimes throwing fireballs, until you rescue the princess) doesn't do the experience of playing the game justice. Describing "i carry your heart with me" (I love you so much that all I do is by and for you) doesn't do the poem justice.
And here is the poem:
i carry your heart with me(i carry it in
my heart)i am never without it(anywhere
i go you go,my dear;and whatever is done
by only me is your doing,my darling)
i fear
no fate(for you are my fate,my sweet)i want
no world(for beautiful you are my world,my true)
and it’s you are whatever a moon has always meant
and whatever a sun will always sing is you
here is the deepest secret nobody knows
(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud
and the sky of the sky of a tree called life;which grows
higher than soul can hope or mind can hide)
and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart
Because our collective western culture is still the direct product of Greek philosophy no matter how many mario kart games are released.
The books in the western canon are important because they are good and went on to influence everything you consume today, even the narrative in super mario. Take some time to read a good chunk of these books and you will be wiser than most people you know on all sorts of topics.
My view is quite different. They're just stories that anyone could have told and don't contain any unobtainable wisdom. The people that told those stories simply existed before us. In many ways the stories are inferior to their modern counterparts.
> In many ways the stories are inferior to their modern counterparts.
This feels to me like a slightly tweaked form of an "appeal to novelty". The most insightful people alive today are not automatically more insightful than everyone who has died. Just because we are alive now doesn't discount the importance of previous works (and this is ignoring that today's society is based on our ancestors' philosophy and views).
Not to mention modern stories are often based on older stories, and those who write modern stories by definition were informed by older stories.
If you're only in for the fun, maybe (and only maybe). But this kind of limited fun is really a puny part of life.
Those stories that "anyone could have told" went through the ages through these specific people, in this specific form.
When you have knowledge of history, of old texts, your self is equipped to be free from manipulation of those that pretend that "things weren't this or that way, but my way" for their own benefit, because you know, because you have something material that holds together, that went through the trial of time, that says otherwise.
The modern counterparts, for instance, pick hugely on old stories, old arcs, and old myths.
But you only get that when you care to read and appreciate old stuff.
The argument here is not about quality. It is about relevance. Specifically, these old works have largely determined our current culture. If you want to understand the current culture, it pays to have some knowledge of what it was based on.
I know it's about relevance. I'm making the unpopular argument that these ancient works aren't really all that relevant, and definitely aren't profound. Simply because something is old and was the first to do something, doesn't make it important.
We have our own culture now, we spend far too much time worrying about what the dead did with their limited free time.
Modern human history is more than 50 years old. While I do appreciate that more modern examples of media might get children more interested in critical analysis, claiming that all of the "valuable" thoughts made by humans only started 50 years ago is incredibly narrow-minded.
Hamlet talks about the human condition and coming to terms with your own mortality. Where in Super Mario does that come up? Before or after world 4?
There are definitely very good and thought-provoking television shows today. I would definitely be in favour of students watching them in class too.
But that doesn't mean that books and other creative media made more than 40 years ago are useless. For one thing, books written in the past give us insight into our history (I hope we can both agree that learning about our history is a good thing). For another, some of the greatest thinkers are already dead -- the only way we can learn from them is by reading what they wrote. Our society is built on the foundations of our ancestors, and it's ridiculous to say that their thoughts have no worth. For one thing, history has a tendency to repeat itself -- so maybe learning a bit more about our history would help avoid future problems.
I can't imagine anyone trying to apply this logic to any field other than literature. "What's the point of learning calculus and kinematics? Newton died 300 years ago!"
Ignoring the provocative/trolling part, studying digital design from a cultural-historic PoV might turn out to much harder than reading books written centuries ago because of lost sources, formats, and devices. Even HTML, with its deep roots in the digital humanities (SGML), has been brittled to death because $reasons.
We need legislation that only affords copyright protection to DRM-free works. Works protected by DRM should not be afforded any more protection than normal trade secrets.
Diane Duane sells her books directly, as DRM-free epubs [0]. Was quite happy when, a decade after first reading it, I found out So You Want To Be A Wizard wasn't standalone and wanted to continue the series.
Pretty much all paid music downloads are DRM-free now. There is usually a distributor like Bandcamp that takes a cut, but that's because most artists aren't going to host their own payment system and file servers.
Have you found a solution to piracy that doesn't involve DRM? What was its success rate? I'm sure the publishers would love to switch to a better system if it exists.
Are you implying that DRM is a solution to piracy? If anything, DRM is a big driver for piracy, and its success rate is near zero. Virtually all major DRM-"protected" works are available on thepiratebay shortly after release. Sometimes before release.
The "better solution" is to treat your customers with respect and let them own their bought goods. Gog.com is a good example here, in my opinion.
What definitely doesn't work is to burden your paying customers with digital locks and hurdles to enjoyment, that the pirates will shortly find a way to remove for the non-paying audience.
Its fine to have an opinion on how things should be, but some of your assertions are not based on facts.
>Virtually all major DRM-"protected" works are available on thepiratebay shortly after release. Sometimes before release.
"Virtually all Server OSs get hacked/have had security bugs. Nobody should use them to host or store anything."
All you're saying is that DRM isn't perfect. Nothing is perfect, and it isn't exactly a revelation.
If it were impossible to pirate Windows, would all the pirates switch to Linux or another Free OS? If the answer is No, then a non-zero number of people will go out and purchase Windows. From a sales standpoint, preventing piracy is definitely going to drive sales. Also, if your answer is Yes to the question, then all the Free OS advocates should be making it impossible to pirate Windows. :)
>The "better solution" is to treat your customers with respect and let them own their bought goods. Gog.com is a good example here, in my opinion.
If we accept your premise that DRM == disrespecting customers, then you'll have to account for why people are still selling stuff with DRM, and continuing to make millions and millions of dollars. Do customers like being disrespected?
>What definitely doesn't work is to burden your paying customers with digital locks and hurdles to enjoyment, that the pirates will shortly find a way to remove for the non-paying audience.
The success of DRM'd products refutes your claim, entirely.
>All you're saying is that DRM isn't perfect. Nothing is perfect, and it isn't exactly a revelation.
DRM and servers are fundamentally different in that securing a server is an achievable goal. There is nothing fundamental that stops you from exposing an interface without any holes in it, even if it's quite hard. DRM is the polar opposite. Where servers are physically isolated from attackers in a manner that allows for perfect security* DRM is physically colocated on the attacker's machine in a manner that explicitly denies perfect security.
Servers are also broken into fairly sporadically for short periods of time and many of them never at all. Data stolen from servers usually slowly goes stale as people change their passwords and so on. On the other side of the fence I cannot think of a DRM that wasn't compromised relatively quickly and excluding anti-cheats once DRM is compromised it stays that way forever.
You can even see the discrepancy in the availability of files. I can pirate basically any game almost immediately after launch but if I want background production files lifted from server, even for an ancient game, the Half-Life 2 beta is almost the only example. One of them is certainly more niche but not enough to explain the size of the gulf.
Both are examples of imperfect things but there's always going to be a line between "imperfect" and "too imperfect to bother with" and personally I feel DRM falls on the "too imperfect" side of that line.
* = Assuming breaking into the data center is outside of the threat model, which it usually is.
Breaking into the data center is NOT outside of the threat model. We spend considerable amount of time detailing what can be done
With physical access and various levels of physical access (for example, can I open the box versus being at the terminal vs having access to ports).
If you’re not doing that with your data centers then you are not even close to doing security right. And if you think it is close to feasible to completely lock down a server then you’re probably not being realistic.
> If it were impossible to pirate Windows, would all the pirates switch to Linux or another Free OS? If the answer is No, then a non-zero number of people will go out and purchase Windows. From a sales standpoint, preventing piracy is definitely going to drive sales.
What your not counting is the number of people who would be happy to purchase it because it's more convenient but get the pirated version because it's superior, being unencumbered by DRM.
As a firefox or chrome user for instance I could pay for netflix, but the will only deliver the 720p version, why would I pay for a worse product?
> "Virtually all Server OSs get hacked/have had security bugs. Nobody should use them to host or store anything."
Your comparison is flawed. Most server installations are not broken into during their lifetime. But it only takes one copy of a movie getting onto thepiratebay to make it accessible to everyone who wants it. So if DRM cannot prevent every attempt at circumvention, it's useless and can only serve to hinder legitimate use of the product.
> If we accept your premise that DRM == disrespecting customers, then you'll have to account for why people are still selling stuff with DRM, and continuing to make millions and millions of dollars.
No, I don't. The fact that some people accept the deal doesn't prove that there's nothing wrong with it. In this case, the seller unilaterally went back on the deal without the customers being involved at all.
I'm not a DRM fanatic and I do use DRM services on a daily basis. But if a vendor pulls a trick like in the OP, they can't then turn around and ask why some potential customers are pirating the product instead. Their addition of DRM has made the service less convenient than piracy. Remember, it's only your legitimate paying customers who have to deal with your DRM. The pirated version has no DRM.
> The success of DRM'd products refutes your claim, entirely.
The purpose of DRM is to prevent piracy. This has mostly been a failure.
>But it only takes one copy of a movie getting onto thepiratebay to make it accessible to everyone who wants it.
Unlocking the DRM on that one movie allows you to pirate that one movie, not all movies. Finding a security bug for one OS allows you to exploit that particular OS.
>So if DRM cannot prevent every attempt at circumvention, it's useless and can only serve to hinder legitimate use of the product.
No, if something even serves as a mild hurdle, it is still beneficial.
>So if DRM cannot prevent every attempt at circumvention, it's useless and can only serve to hinder legitimate use of the product.
Given the abundance of hundreds, and in some cases thousands of vulnerabilities, it seems securing any OS is an impossible task. To take smartphones phones as an example, a vast vast majority of phones have had vulnerabilities which let you root/jailbreak them.
>No, I don't. The fact that some people accept the deal doesn't prove that there's nothing wrong with it. In this case, the seller unilaterally went back on the deal without the customers being involved at all.
You do, because I don't accept the argument you made. Your broad claim that DRM == disrespecting consumers doesn't seem to be borne out by the market. So it seems we've reached a bit of an impasse.
>The purpose of DRM is to prevent piracy. This has mostly been a failure.
You have to actually demonstrate that it is a failure. Whats plain to see for anyone is that products like adobe photoshop for e.g. are going from 'little league' DRM to 'major league' DRM + subscription and are making even more money. Its fine to lament at how the world sucks, but its important to be realistic and fact based when doing so.
FYI, Bill Gates has explicitly stated he prefers pirated MS Windows use to unencumbered Linux converts:
"[A]s long as they're going to steal it, we want them to steal ours. They'll get sort of addicted, and then we'll somehow figure out how to collect sometime in the next decade."
I don't see what point you're trying to make? Microsoft continues to protect all their commercial products with DRM. They clearly see value in doing that.
I hope you realize that "more" vs "less" DRM, is not the same as DRM vs no-DRM. In any case, I don't see anything I can respond to.. so.. thanks for the comment.
This is a very old debate. It was settled a long time ago. Restrictive copyright protection measures hurt sales. Because it prevents potential customers from trying your products. Anyone arguing otherwise is motivated by something other than facts, history, logic.
Companies are not dummies, they know what works and how to make money. DRMd content is a billion+ dollar industry. But yeah, if you believe that it doesn't work, you're free to believe so.
>Anyone arguing otherwise is motivated by something other than facts, history, logic.
Oh? I thought Apple Music was encumbered with DRM in their M4P format. I'm not super familiar with their service though. Maybe I'm wrong..
Edit: Looks like the M4P format was mainly on older songs pre2009. Though I see forum threads with people saying that they have to re-pay Apple w/ itunes match to get the drm-free version.
The whole digital music industry has left DRM behind - I buy my music losslessly and from a number of stores without any strings attached. Of course this can only apply to purchasable content - streaming service obviously need to rely on DRM.
Apple Music (the streaming service) has DRM IIRC. But iTunes used to sell DRM-laden music in the mid-2000s and about 10 years ago they stopped. You can download all of your iTunes songs as MP3s right now.
For movies? Netflix. For books? Piracy is irrelevant. (See far too many articles from Konrath, who at one point uploaded all his books on a torrent site AND advertised that on his blog... to no effect on his sales.)
I don't know if you know this, but DRM is a core part of Netflix. No studio would ever have signed up with them if they couldn't control distribution.
>See far too many articles from Konrath, who at one point uploaded all his books on a torrent site AND advertised that on his blog... to no effect on his sales
I am not familiar with that example. Any link to the data?
- The DRM of Netflix is irrelevant. The people who want to download the movies will do it anyway, but their number got way lower once Netflix (and probably Hulu and others like them) got a large enough catalog. People like convenience and are willing to pay for it.
- I couldn't immediately find the article where he announced that HE uploaded his books (as an experiment), but here is one of the many articles where he dismisses the issue:
The number of people willing to download movies and TV shows is going to only get higher now that the movie streaming space is getting balkanized, and Netflix in particular is shedding its catalogue faster than my cat sheds its fur.
I pay for Netflix. I'm probably going to reduce my plan in the next month or two, to buy a subscription to HBO. Sure. But there's no way in hell I'm going to pay for Netflix and HBO and Hulu and Disney and CBS and whatever other fly-by-night streaming service that happened to inherit rights to the particular show I wanted to watch. Not even because it's too much money (though frankly, it is), but because it's a hassle. Hassle with managing accounts and subscriptions. Hassle with dealing with everyone's bullshit web UI that's different from everyone else's bullshit web UI. Hassle with dealing with VPN and getting a US CC somehow, because I'm willing to bet region restrictions are only going to get worse.
Compared to all that, BitTorrent just works. And between PopcornTime and Radarrr/Sonarrr, I hear it even works better than the streaming services now. I might need to look into it.
Exactly this. I pay for Netflix, YouTube Premium, Amazon Prime, and BT TV. Recently all of my friends were talking about Chernobyl. It's not on any of these services (Sky TV exclusive in the UK). I take pride in paying for my entertainment and software but I'm not signing up to yet another streaming service just to watch a 5 episode miniseries.
So I torrented it. Same goes for the movies that I can't legally watch any other way.
No company has ever gone out of business because of piracy. How is adobe still going in that case? I doubt the average user of photoshop was willing to drop hundreds of dollars to purchase a software license off them over the years.
If someone is willing to pirate one game no matter the cost, then they are very likely to pirate all games they play. That doesn't translate into lost sales, they are stopping people who have no interest in making a purchase to begin with.
From the music industry to software industry, you have to ask, are big companies trying to protect their revenue, or profit? I find it hard to sympathize with companies that are disappointed with making only tens to hundreds of millions in profit. Exponential growth is not realistic, it means more monopolies over products and services.
Morally evil? They’re giving full refunds on the books.
This type of hyperbole makes it hard to take anti-DRM arguments seriously. “It’s a less desirable technology choice” feels more like the right level of angst IMO.
The reason why trades happen is that both sides value what the other party has more. So I value a book more than I value the money the seller wants to charge for it, so I buy it.
So that means that I would lose out with a unilateral unwinding of the trade.
Imagine the outcry if this happened in the financial world: "Yeah, we sold you that stock, but we're taking it back now, you'll be OK because we're giving you the money back." Isn't going to fly.
Every piece of DRM'd content will end up like this. Every book, movie, show, album, and game will be dead in a few decades (or sooner) if it relies on some company maintaining it's servers.
It's good that there's alternatives, but it seems like the alternatives are slowly diminishing.
Take this with a grain of salt, but Steam support says there are "measures in place" to ensure users have access to DRM'd games when steam dies [0]. (Not to mention that it's trivially easy to remove Steam DRM with existing tools)
right... like what if Valve actually even intends to do it, but it requires someone to throw a switch and the last guy that knows how to (or even just to) do that dies suddenly just before Valve suddenly goes bankrupt.
I wonder how this can even be legal in Europe. If someone sold you something, its yours. AFAIK, There is enough consumer protection to stop most EULA bullshit. So it seems it only needs someone to sue and some proof microsoft used the word 'sold' when you bought it.
I doubt the law requires anything more than the full refund which MS is providing.
Similarly, if someone sells you a physical product that is faulty, the seller is not required to produce a replacement, they can just refund you instead.
> the seller is not required to produce a replacement
As well they cannot demand any such thing - the country's money is legislated to be accepted as a settlement for any kind of debt. It's the "legal tender" thing.
Defective instances are a random (though not unpredictable) event occurring independently between instances, with no influence by the manufacturer, designholder, or vendor.
Hitting the Molly Switch on a DRM service is the exact opposite.
The UK Consumer Rights Act (CRA) appears to anticipate this as it has no absolute date beyond which goods should remain suitable for purpose.
Digital goods should last infinitely, so a digital good that 'expires' should be fixed or the cost fully refunded (fully as there are still an infinite number of years of use left available; and that should be accounting for inflation too).
That's like saying the car factory is allowed to take an old timer from you if they refund its original price.
Can I use the money to buy the same book? Is my time lost searching for this replacement worth nothing? If I added annotations, do they end up in the new book? If you answer any of these questions with 'no', its not fair enough.
You could have originally bought it on sell and that sell is no longer available.
You could have added value to the ebook by way of adding annotations.
The ebook could have had better display than its competitors, if it and all other equal quality displays vanished, they are now very rare. Someone would be willing to pay more than your original purchase price if they could now get that display experience.
What's the definition of "fair" here? There are many scenarios under which that makes no sense. Is the price inflation adjusted? What if the currency in question tanked in the mean time? What about actual labor done on the copy (annotations, notes, ...). Not faulting Microsoft, but we really need to rethink this model.
There's also a great story regarding "right of first purchase" in the USA where Redbox literally purchases DVDs at retail so that they can rent them out to customers because Disney would not sell directly to them: https://gizmodo.com/redboxs-crafty-workaround-for-stocking-d...
Yep. This is why I don't have a cloud-based digital library. UV offered a way to migrate to other providers, but will the next one? I don't know that they're legally allowed to. What if the other provider doesn't have the content, am I SOL?
I so badly wish I could buy a license to get a specific piece of content, get a copy to play on my own computer, then also have the ability to "upload" (aka, unlock) that content on a cloud streaming service of my choice.
There will be a time, I'm not sure when, that the whole "its a license!" nonsense will die a hard death. It would be unwise for any company to rely too heavily upon it. This is not a new tactic at all. It works only temporarily, but has been used in a multitude of different industries through history - and the end is always the same. Eventually some company will push it too far. They will rip the wrong people off, and there will be a court case. The court is a very sensible place, usually. They will ask "when the consumer gave you money, what did you provide to them?" And if the answer boils down to "nothing. We assumed no obligation to them, and they gained no rights to anything" then the court is going to see it for the fraud it is.
Personally I'd just like to see some 'false advertising' lawsuits. It should be illegal to say "Buy the book!" if you literally are not being offered a sale. If you're being offered a licensing opportunity, it should have to be marketed as such. Yes, this would confuse consumers. I want it to. I want them to actually ask what they're getting, since up to this point the entire marketplace is founded upon tricking people into thinking they are buying a copy (like they would in a store), but in reality they are only getting a license (which grants no rights, places no obligations on the licensor, and can be cancelled at any time for any or no reason... in other words, you're throwing money at a company and hoping they don't screw you too bad).
I do the same now with movies, as well as making sure I have unencumbered digital copies of any music I buy. I'm happy to pay for good content but damned if I'm going to buy it again every time the disc scratches (and besides, who even has a CD drive any more?)
You just signaled that you find value in the DRM'd product, even if that wasn't your intent. Why not reward creators who choose to distribute their works without DRM? I'm neither pro nor anti-DRM, but I find that people who love to hate on DRM (nothing personal towards you), never seem to be willing to take a hit when it comes to living without popular content that doesn't exist on non-DRM channels/platforms.
> I find that people who love to hate on DRM (nothing personal towards you), never seem to be willing to take a hit when it comes to living without popular content that doesn't exist on non-DRM channels/platforms.
I pay for DRM-free versions of anything if it's available -- even if it's more expensive (I've downloaded many hundreds of dollars of DRM-free audiobooks). I eben refuse to buy physical books from authors like JK Rowling (who tried to force book-owners to return copies of the Half-Blood Prince that were accidentally sold early).
Here in Australia you sometimes can't even buy the DRM-up-the-wazoo version. Game of Thrones wasn't available through any legal channels for years. And that's ignoring the Australia Tax we get for not being from the US or Europe (the shipping costs of bytes is very high it seems).
Then again, I also don't watch too many films or shows these days. Mainly because I can't get many DRM-free versions.
Game of thrones was such a good example of how out of date DRM can get.
It was quite literally getting released months after it's release in the US in the early seasons, and only on pay TV.
With the way everyone is connected online, it was ludicrous to think people were going to wait months to watch each episode and not get it spoiled for them and/or not be able to discuss it on worldwide forums.
Because we rarely have the choice. I'd wager it's a conservative estimate to say 90% of published content is under drm restrictions. I wouldn't be surprised if it was more like 99%.
And what of students with textbooks? Zero choice for alternatives there, and increasingly even the physical versions all come with required drmed additional single-use content making resale value of the book worhtless when once it was a source of a bit of extra money after spending hundreds on them at the start of the semester.
The general principle of removing DRM is forbidden, at least in the US, which is presumably why DRM removal tools are distributed through the same shady web sources as pirated content.
"No person shall circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title."
The ambiguity is resolved by the explicit definition provided in the section: 'a technological measure "effectively controls access to a work" if the measure, in the ordinary course of its operation, requires the application of information, or a process or a treatment, with the authority of the copyright owner, to gain access to the work.' So the word 'effectively' isn't very effective here.
I have a close friend who published an engineering text book. He worked a couple of years on it and it was well received in his particular field. The book was pirated within months and is freely available on PDF. It's unfair that his hard work is being used globally for free.
So yes, having books shut off sucks but so does piracy.
There is a big difference between copying physical objects and digital ones.
Books can be copied for sure, but the cost of copying a digital book is negligible compared to the cost of copying a real book. Zero cost of copying makes it possible to give it away for free (e.g. to drive traffic) and monetize otherwise (most digital piracy is business, not charity).
In the physical world, copied books are not given away for free typically because the cost of copying a book is relatively high.
Copyrighting digital items is a fundamental problem which has no good solution so far.
A physical book can readily be hand-scanned in an hour. There are numerous guides to processing the scans from that point. Two of the besst I've found:
Well, he is arguing it’s not. I imagine you’ve seen a photocopier. You don’t need the copy to be the same print quality, size, or even bound at all.
In fact copying entire books was done daily where I went to university and took no longer than 15m, at something like five bucks each. You’d bring that stack of A4 home, and maybe hand it down if it survived the semester.
I'm largely referring to digital reproduction. A tablet, or better, e-ink reader, can hold 1,000s of texts for the price of a single mid-priced academic work. And in most cases, sufices.
Photocopying / xerographic printing is modestly expensive, though a high-quality laserprinter reduces costs to about a penny per printed side. Stock choice (acid-free rag, for durability) is a larger cost.
Does it matter what the cost is if it's cheaper and the money doesn't go to the owner? Seems like reasoning in search of a real world difference rather than a real world difference in search of reasoning.
It being "unfair" seems to hinge on the assumption piracy = lost sale. Unless your friend simply laments people learn when they otherwise wouldn't have paid anyways in which case I'm not particularly sympathetic but at least understand the reasoning.
As an hypothetical.. If it were impossible to pirate Windows, would all of those users switch to BSD or some other free OSs? If even a single person goes out and buys Windows, then there is a definite argument that piracy resulted in the loss of at-least one sale.
As another hypothetical... if it were impossible to pirate Windows, would it be nearly as popular around the world? If even one person/business would have used something else that was free as a result of having never used Windows before then there is a definite argument piracy drives sales.
I'd argue it's exceptionally rare that a digital good be so unique as to be a "buy legitimately or have nothing" item and any DRM designed to treat software like that does more harm to sales through difficulty to purchase or use than it saves.
>As another hypothetical... if it were impossible to pirate Windows, would it be nearly as popular around the world?
Why Windows became popular will never have a single unarguable objective answer. It was probably a combination of factors, like anything else. The only fact we know is that Microsoft became one the most successful and richest companies, and it was because hundreds of millions of people paid Microsoft for their software, when credible alternatives existed and continue to exist.
>If even one person/business would have used something else that was free as a result of having never used Windows before then there is a definite argument piracy drives sales.
I'm not sure I follow your line of thought here. Piracy made windows popular, and so people bought Windows because... they didn't want to pirate it? That is a pretty convoluted argument.. ! :)
Microsoft did not grow big, because millions of home users decided to buy DOS/Windows as they considered the best choice. Microsoft purchased DOS, which was bundled for every single IBM PC. This gave the foundation for the company to be able to improve their software family giving them a stable income even if every single DOS alternative was superior to their system. IBM was not able to prevent the creation of the PC compatibles which was a really strong advantage for MS as DOS became their default go to OS. Cheap computers created a really big market for the platform so developing to MS products became a good idea. However the businesses were the ones who choose to buy Microsoft products, and not because of the OS, but their office software products, which worked, of course, primarily in their OS.
Most of the home users just get it bundled with their hardware purchase, others for home use just pirated it (especially out of US). Their focus were the software they use, did not really care about the OS.
And that's how piracy helped MS, children playing with computer games arrived in the work market with familiarity with MS products, which kept the companies using and buying those products.
>Microsoft did not grow big, because millions of home users decided to buy DOS/Windows as they considered the best choice.
Yes, things don't get popular primarily because they're the best in class. They get popular because of a variety of factors. That applies to all tech products that are popular - Photoshop, oracle, mysql, windows, macOS, Linux, iphones, android phones, etc, etc, etc. MS, like every other company started at 0% market share. People chose to use their products because they provided some value to them. If you don't think people bought MS products because they were good, thats OK, you can have that opinion. Whether or not MS software is shitty has no real bearing on my point here.
>And that's how piracy helped MS, children playing with computer games arrived in the work market with familiarity with MS products, which kept the companies using and buying those products.
Without any numbers or data, I will just have to accept your argument at face value. I'd love to see verified stats of sales versus users/installations. Will be easy to confirm exactly how much of an effect it had...
> Piracy made windows popular, and so people bought Windows because... they didn't want to pirate it?
Many pirates are not bad people: they want to pay for your content, but for a variety of reasons they can’t (DRM prevents them from using it they way they want, they can’t afford it right now, etc.) As circumstances change they will purchase your stuff.
So what you're saying is the mechanism they put in place to prevent your friends book from being pirated failed within months?
Yet all those who purchased it legally could one day be left with having their purchase shut off? They might be lucky and get refunds but they still lose access to the book.
To me that seems like an utter failure for everyone.
There was no DRM put on the book, it was book-form only. Someone copied it, made a PDF of it, and distributed it for free. His royalties plummeted to almost nothing.
So.. I am confused what your point is? DRM wouldn't have helped this situation, which I think actually HELPS the case against DRM... it only hurts legitimate readers, pirates would have gotten it anyway.
Can you disclose which textbook it was? I'm curious. Was it a good textbook?
The textbook market is a predatory scheme to fleece money out of students who are usually pretty close to broke, by making the books more important even than healthy food.
Not releasing a new edition every few years would have the same effect as "piracy", once the used market is large enough to supply each new class.
Professors and professionals who write textbooks should treat them as a marketing and career advancement exercise. Write a good book, get noticed by tenure committees or potential consulting clients. Most people who write books like that already have relatively secure jobs, and the book, if it's not awful, improves their career trajectory even more. It builds their reputation or brand.
It's tough to side with them over broke college students slavishly scanning thousand-page textbooks while eating ramen.
Does your friend get royalty for each copy of the book? Could your friend have negotiated an upfront fee from the publisher and no royalty? This way, only the publisher would be exposed to piracy risk, a risk it can manage much better than an author ever could.
Works pretty well for Steam. I bet most people here don't even know that they can't play their Steam games if they don't connect it to the internet every 30(?) days. Yet people boast about their massive Steam libraries. :)
Because Steam is DRM done right (in terms of ease of use). With Steam, you just press a button, and the game is yours to play. Zero friction.
99% of the time DRM is used, it makes the product less convenient to use by people who bought it legally, as opposed to those who pirated it. An example that comes to mind, all those blu-rays with bajillion of warnings and ads before the movie starts vs. just watching the movie right off the bat without any ads or wasted time if pirated. Don't even get me started on Denuvo or any other video-game DRMs, those are creatures straight out of UX nightmares.
Steam gets around by having an amazing UX. Press button get game. It's easier than pirating, while most other drm solutions are generally more difficult than pirating.
Steam doesn't even have particularly good drm. The media isn't encrypted, only the executables, so you can generally just get a nocd crack and overwrite the encrypted binary in the install folder.
Note that some Steam games are DRM-free and do not require Steam for anything beyond first download. Sadly this isn't mentioned anywhere in the game page so unless you already know about if a game uses Steam's DRM or not, it is a gamble.
> It's unfair that his hard work is being used globally for free.
It's unfair? Sounds like a dream come true to me, I'd love for my work to have such incredible reach. Is your friend starving, or living on the street or something?
The lack of empathy in the responses is staggering to me. It's as if the idea that a content creator should be financially rewarded for his or her hard work is some sort of moral crime. Yes, DRM sucks, but what other way can content providers ensure that they get rewarded for the hard work and good content that they provide?
We can agree that content creators should get paid AND that DRM sucks. The key point is that DRM DOESN'T REDUCE PIRACY, IT JUST MAKES LIFE HARDER FOR LEGITIMATE READERS.
DRM isn't super hard to break, it is just annoying. But for piracy, only ONE person has to break it, and suddenly it is available, DRM free, for everyone. Legitimate readers continue to be forced to deal with DRM annoyance while pirates get a DRM free experience.
How does this help the situation of content creators not getting paid?
Maybe that's because these sob stories were already accounted for by the _original_ copyright length of 28 years? The vast majority of DRM is protecting some corporation's right to profit off of the work of content creators almost indefinitely.
I'm not talking about copyright law, I'm talking about DRM. Go look at the videogame industry and denuvo. They use it because it's hard to crack during the initial sales window, once it gets cracked usually after a couple months they patch it out and don't bother to replace it because its job is done.
It shouldn't be when you consider that the topic is textbooks. I agree, work hard, give good content that's better than the competition on the market, and I'll gladly pay for that value. However, textbooks are not a free market. They are a captive market, where the professor decides what textbook is ordained for the course.
Students usually have the choice of the brand new print edition $$$ that they can resell for $, the ebook edition ($$) that expires after the term and you cannot resell, or fighting for one of the two copies of the book on 2 hour loan from the main campus library. Some professors do not let you use an older copy, and for some classes, they make you do your homework on proprietary publisher websites that charge for temporary access codes. So even if you pirated your book you would still have to pay McGraw Hill their cut to get full points in the class.
Curious how well textbook prices correlate to the maximum federal loan you can apply for.
It is rather bizarre to see some people feel entitled to content which isn't distributed as per their own personal wishes. A principled person would chose to take his/her business elsewhere and purchase a book on a platform whose ethics they agree with.
Not saying I'm some Mother Teresa type.. but I'm against online ads, and I don't run an ad-blocker. I simply don't visit sites which feature blaring in-your-face ads. I filter Google results to exclude domains which I will never visit because of their ad policy.
> It is rather bizarre to see some people feel entitled to content which isn't distributed as per their own personal wishes. A principled person would chose to take his/her business elsewhere and purchase a book on a platform whose ethics they agree with.
Couple counter-points:
1) It's reasonable that I'm expected to compensate the creator for the content. It's not reasonable for the publisher to dictate how I get to consume that content, especially not by forcing me to use particular format, software or hardware. DRM is enforcing the latter, not the former.
2) Having personal wishes wrt. content distribution is part of the market game. There is huge demand for bullshit-free content distribution, which is evidenced by the success of Steam and Netflix (especially relative to Torrents!), who cut out most of the crap and left the "you're now renting the content, not buying it".
3) Most content is non-substitutable. You can't just "take your business elsewhere", because there's nowhere else to take the business to! If Disney decides that the newest Star Wars is DRMed, there's shit all I can do - it's going to be DRMed everywhere, I can only choose from providers that enforce that DRM, and I can't exactly go and watch some cat videos on PeerTube instead - I wanted Star Wars, not smelly cats. This applies to books, movies, TV shows, video games, and to a large extent, to music.
1) If I'm selling lemonade and my terms and conditions are that you have to jump 10 times before paying me, and I only accept payment in rocks with 10% ferrous oxide, you are free to laugh and ignore me. Please also remember that we're talking about games, movies, music... not exactly life-critical products.
2) I agree. I avoid DRM and other BS as much as possible. I went out and purchased affinity photo when photoshop went to a subscription model. I'm going to cling on to my CS6 for as many years as I can. Yes, I'm going to lose out eventually when plugins stop working or when I buy a new camera whose RAW files cannot be opened by CS6, but thems the breaks.
3) Yes, that sucks! I don't know what else to say. You can either be principled and avoid DRM, or be a realist and accept DRM in as few places as possible. I'm objecting to the "I'm entitled to pirate it because they didn't sell it or stream it without DRM" mindset.
1) Sure, but while you can set conditions on my purchasing lemonade from you, you're not entitled to tell me what I can do with the lemonade after I buy it and walk away from the stand. Unfortunately, DRM does exactly that - it limits the ways I can consume products after I already paid all relevant parties for it.
3) I can be principled realist and accept DRM whenever it's convenient, and find ways to break it or alternate sources whenever I prefer it.
You can't dismiss it all as entitlement. Imagine that you have a gym membership and someone is offering a service to life your weights for you for a fee. Do you have a right not not lift weights without paying this fee? Of course you do.
Some of these things that people want to charge fees for are things that you can participate in for free naturally, so long as nobody is gate-keeping you. So it's very hard to justify spending money on them... particularly if you consider them bad for you, (like, say, binging on Netflix.)
It is the freedom of the creator to pick a license and method they wish to use to distribute their work. I'm talking about DRM for things which are mostly entertainment - things like movies, games, music, etc. We all have equal freedoms to not support such platforms. I don't follow what point you're trying to make with your gym example. If the gym has some policies which you dislike, you can simply chose to not go there. (I know people love to take things to extremes, so I'm obviously obviously not talking about racist policies or other illegal exclusionary practices)
They gym doesn't have any policy. If you have a membership, you're free to use the facility or not. Real life doesn't have any policy either, if you have the capability, you're free to copy & distribute what you have access to or not. It is a third party that is trying to interfere with these native abilities. The ability to create something is not intrinsically tied to the ability to control it.
Which isn't to say there's anything wrong with copyright laws, per se. What I'm saying is that it is not 'entitlement' on the part of the copier, but entitlement on the part of the copyright holder to expect to hold dominion over other people's capabilities. That is the negotiated result of social processes.
>if you have the capability, you're free to copy & distribute what you have access to or not.
Well, you can do anything you like with the freedoms you have as enshrined in the legal framework that applies to your domicile. Do you also respect the freedom of a creator to choose a license and a distribution method of their liking for their works? It seems like you don't.
> What I'm saying is that it is not 'entitlement' on the part of the copier, but entitlement on the part of the copyright holder to expect to hold dominion over other people's capabilities.
But the fact is that one of those people is on firm legal ground, and the other one isn't.
>Which isn't to say there's anything wrong with copyright laws, per se.
Well, your comments seem to indicate that you find many things wrong with the copyright law.
>Do you also respect the freedom of a creator to choose a license and a distribution method of their liking for their works? It seems like you don't.
It seems like you want to peddle a narrative. Otherwise you wouldn't be jumping to conclusions about things you have no knowledge of.
>Well, your comments seem to indicate that you find many things wrong with the copyright law.
My comments are not referring to the merit of copyright law. In fact, I explicitly said that I'm not arguing there was anything wrong with it per se in order to highlight that. So if that's what you're looking for, stop. You are missing my point. Don't accuse me of trying to make a point that I am explicitly telling you I'm not trying to make. That is beyond uncharitable.
>But the fact is that one of those people is on firm legal ground, and the other one isn't.
Copyright law was invented in the seventeenth century. The vast majority of human history has taken place in a world where humans were rewarded for copying and sharing any information they could find. I have the lyrics to a copyrighted song stuck in my head at this very moment! I don't want it, but it is there.
My objection is the use of the word 'entitlement,' which is nothing more than a propagandist term here.
> Real life doesn't have any policy either, if you have the capability, you're free to copy & distribute what you have access to or not. It is a third party that is trying to interfere with these native abilities.
Your comment indicates that you feel its your right to be able to infringe on copyright.
>My objection is the use of the word 'entitlement,' which is nothing more than a propagandist term here.
Okay, I won't use that term, what term would you prefer?
My comment indicates that the world is complicated and that we don't need to paint people's behaviors are unreasonable just because they happen to be unlawful.
Gyms are substitutable, "movies, games, music, etc." are not. Your argument works for e.g. Steam vs. GOG when both carry a particular game, but it doesn't work in general, because a DRMed work is usually DRMed everywhere.
Well, okay, maybe you won't be able to buy a non-DRM version of a game you really like. That is a problem for the creator. If people simply walked out of a situation where they don't agree with the terms, maybe more creators would notice.
Especially when it comes to an engineering textbook. While my university's selected electrical engineering books were all sub-$500 (usually in the $300 range), most of the "core" civil engineering books were at or over $1,000. Just insane for anyone who was not on scholarship. (And this was 20 years ago!)
Surely with prices going that high the students could pool their resources to buy one copy and have it professionally scanned? It's only $1 per 100 pages.
Yes, it's inflated. Looking up a selection of my engineering textbooks from junior and senior year at my alma mater, where I remember new list prices of $150-200 and used prices of $100-150 per course in books they now add up to a typical $250 list new.
However, there are a lot of ebook options now for $50-100 per course. Books that can stop working, as crazy as the linked tweet thread acknowledges. Books that will not be available on my bookshelf if I want to keep them for reference in the future.
And there's still piracy. I expect the ebooks will make this more and not less popular; a lot of pirated textbooks were...allegedly....low-quality scans when I was in college.
Pirated textbooks are better than the ebook even. I wonder how they are sourced, because they are clean proofs even with markings where the binding obscures the pages when printed as a textbook. Must be from someone with access to those raw files. Plus, they are PDFs, and not clunky slow ebook files of varying proprietary format and offline availability.
Textbook prices correlate with federal loan amounts. Publishers probably take the same % of that loan limit to price their books, so ironically the tools designed to help make education affordable are being exploited to make education unaffordable.
DRM isn't the answer. It's always been trivial to break DRM on e-books, and I wouldn't be surprised if DRM actually increases pirating. Why buy something that restricts your ability to use it and is inconvenient when you can pirate a version that doesn't do that?
This definitely sucks. Why do you think people are buying this book? Is it required for a course?
When there is a book I need, but don't want, I'll get by with a PDF. When its a book I want, I buy the real thing, because I enjoy having it.
Just curious, what the intended use of the book is, and whether you think a similar attitude might have had any effect.
Chances are, your friend would have made dimes per book while the publisher pulled $180 a pop from broke indebted students trapped in a captive market. Textbooks have gotten so costly because students are just the publisher's delivery device for the huge amounts of federal loan money awarded every year.
There was no DRM put on the book, it was book-form only. Someone copied it, made a PDF of it, and distributed it for free. His royalties plummeted to almost nothing.
I really believe that books should be mostly free and people should//would pay based on usefulness. I will gladly donate 200$ for a book that helped me. I would also never have bought that same book if it was 10$ to start with.
Most authors of anything other than best selling trash don't make anything worth caring about. Almost all the money goes to publishing, including ebooks. Does piracy still suck?
Because of the volatile nature of all things web, I frequently screenshot (yes, screenshot, because printing to PDFs makes them look awful, imo) Twitter conversations, print blog posts to PDF or download articles that I want to make sure that I don't loose.
I have a collection of over 1000 faved tweets that's one of my favorite possessions. I noticed that one would occasionally get deleted by the author so I wrote a script to screenshot them all with a Python package called Splinter.
I get so frusterated when anonymous reddit users overwrite their posts with some script in the name of privacy. Just leave out personal details from the public internet, it's not hard. Plus, if I really wanted to, there are at least a half dozen different ways to look at a cached copy of your overwritten reddit comment.
I can still hear my professor of Classics say that "with the introduction of the printing press the loss of books ceased". With all that electronic junk that no one knows how to archive properly that statement needs to be revisited.
> I can still hear my professor of Classics say that "with the introduction of the printing press the loss of books ceased".
...what? Loss of books has pretty much nothing to do with the technology used to produce them. If you stop producing them and lose the existing ones, they're gone.
You can lose printing plates just as easily as you can lose a printed book. Actually, losing the plates is much easier -- the point of movable type is that you can cannibalize old plates to print new works.
Think about the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yongle_Encyclopedia -- not printed for budgetary reasons, but produced several hundred years after the introduction of the printing press. Almost all of it is gone.
The loss of books and other written works was almost total prior to the printing press. A small number of durable tablets and some funeral documents were preserved simply by lasting a long time. Others, like many religious documents, were preserved in some form or another by expensive, tedious, completely manual copying. Some information (both fiction and nonfiction) was only ever verbally communicated, as it wasn't deemed worth the expense and difficulty of putting it onto paper.
Your link says "A manuscript copy was commissioned by Jiajing Emperor in 1562 and completed in 1567.[8] The original copy was lost afterwards. " That doesn't often happen when you can produce 10,000 copies.
It's not about the loss of the printing plates. It's about the extraordinary difficulty of preserving a document of which a single copy exists, and the much higher probability that one of thousands will survive.
> The loss of books and other written works was almost total prior to the printing press. A small number of durable tablets
Mesopotamian clay tablets are incredibly robust. We have many times more than we have the manpower to translate, not to speak of the ones still buried in more or less unknown locations.
Funnily enough, they survived much better in cities that were destroyed -- and burned, firing the tablets -- than in cities that weren't, where the tablets might eventually fall below the water table and dissolve.
But anyway, we don't have "a small number" of durable tablets; we have an extremely large number, including some entire royal libraries.
> Your link says "A manuscript copy was commissioned by Jiajing Emperor in 1562 and completed in 1567.[8] The original copy was lost afterwards. " That doesn't often happen when you can produce 10,000 copies.
This is not the case; China had extensive markets in printed popular works for centuries beforehand. Most of that work doesn't survive because of lack of interest. The fate of almost all printed material is total disappearance, because we can only maintain so much material, and printed material is a subset of all material.
> At the time of Hong Mai's death in 1202, the Record [夷坚志] had grown to a massive collection of 420 chapters, totaling over four thousand entries. Although it was not clear whether any complete editions were ever published by any Song publisher, we do know that multiple editions of varying sizes and qualities were made available by commercial publishing houses in different parts of the country. Much of the Record was nonetheless lost as early as the Yuan Dynasty [less than 100 years later], an indication of the traumatic effects of the Song-Yuan transition. The current 207-chapter editions are based on post-Song redactions and later manuscripts by traditional and modern scholars.
Note that this is a famous work considered relevant today. Contrast the countless printed popular works that nobody thought were worth preserving in the first place.
The ability to make copies is not relevant in the slightest. The number of copies made is relevant, but only weakly. Information is preserved when people devote effort to preserving it, and lost otherwise.
I think by "loss of books" he means the extinction of a text. The printing press means more copies of a book can be printed, thus lowering the chance that we lose the text altogether
> I think by "loss of books" he means the extinction of a text.
And that is exactly how I've interpreted it in all of my comments.
> The printing press means more copies of a book can be printed, thus lowering the chance that we lose the text altogether
As I point out in response to your sibling comment, Mesopotamian works, which had to be copied by hand 3000 years ago, have been much better preserved than Chinese works that were mass produced 1000 years ago, simply because clay tablets are much more robust than paper is.
Though note that after the cultural upheaval brought by Islam, the Persians forgot how to read that inscription, which is a different form of book loss.
I have a Kindle for a few years now, and I love it... but the weird thing it's that most of the books I have read on the platform, haven't been acquired through Amazon. All of this it's thanks to me being afraid of this kind of practices, plus the weird pricing doesn't help (like some hard covers being cheaper than digital books).
I kinda like the humble bundle approach to this, where I can buy bulks of books DRM free in my PC, that are easy to use thanks to software like Calibre. I hope soon the e-book industry have an equivalent to gog in games, or bandcamp to music.
Yeah the subscription model it's cool, comfy and all, but what happen when the company behind decides to shutdown the product because didn't reach the desired metrics? I mean I can see Google having their own Stadia for books, and a few years go by and then they GoogleReaderIt/PlusIt, and that's it, my library of started books with their literally bookmarks and notes are gone.
I've always considered the internet (in its current form) to be histories biggest book burning event. Hoarding rss feeds I often reached a point around 35 000 subs where the number of new ones I find is roughly equal to the deleted websites. I'm sort of stuck in a mental loop thinking of book burning.
I’m more disturbed by the fact that they can also edit or remove books that I’ve already purchased. How long until Amazon is forced to “deplatform” something offensive? Those old books contain a lot of words and ideas that have no place in 2019.
It’s one of several reasons why I mostly only buy paper books.
Much of this discourse would make more sense if we use the term ebook, instead of book. When we say book, it conjures the notion of atoms. When we use the term ebook, we understand there's a technical dependency. Surely nobody expects any technical service to run forever funded by a once off payment.
The much bigger problem with DRM content is that I cannot give them to my children. My kids can browse my many bookcases, and might be curious to read one of hundreds of book they may not choose to buy. That cannot happen with DRM ebooks.
I'm astonished that Microsoft is apparently just refunding the original purchase price of (everybody's?) books.
What's most mind boggling is the realization that apparently nobody sat down and planned this situation out - because if they did, the idea that someone could get an okay from their boss on the idea that even a mildly unsuccessful result and end of life of the product would end in full refunds for everybody.
What's the point of even doing business?
Am I misunderstanding this outcome? That means anyone who used this product got free book rentals for whatever they wanted to read?
...
Let's talk about DRM now.
DRM in itself as a concept is not bad (IMO), and it's probably necessary for a lot of products that obviously would not have been created had 100% of the customers decided not to pay.
However, I think what we fail to talk about is how there's no agreed upon standard regulating the end of life and transferral procedures involved with works sold under DRM.
I suspect that book publishers would not agree to allow Microsoft to say "the store is closed, your books can be unlocked once you follow this procedure." Even if they're okay with that, Microsoft probably didn't even have the foresight to implement that sort of thing on a technical level.
So, what we need in the digital goods industry is some kind of statement to the customer that's set in stone regarding what will happen with your content if the business ceases to exist and the platform is canceled.
There's some semblance of this concept around. For example, Ultraviolet is shutting down in July - so, you have the option to transfer movies to other services for most movies on that platform (it should be all movies).
MoviesAnywhere is also a DRM service making an attempt at avoiding platform lock-in for digitally purchased movies.
But beyond that, there needs to be some sort of guarantee that you'll get perpetual access or a refund. The fact that Microsoft is dishing out refunds since that's cheaper than getting sued by every customer they've ever sold a book to is not a given - imagine if Valve were to go bankrupt and simply shut down their servers one day. That's where DRM should have a sort of mandatory living will.
DRM caused this problem, and if you want to convince me that the solution is more advanced DRM that somehow fails open when the company that built it goes out of business, you'll need a stronger argument than "it's probably necessary for a lot of products that obviously would not have been created had 100% of the customers decided not to pay."
Abolishing copyright wouldn't eliminate all creative works. It would eliminate a lot of the funding, but there would still be plenty of people willing to create things for free and other creators working on a patronage or cross-subsidisation model. It's not obvious to me that the world would be a worse place under these conditions. I'm prepared to give up the certainty of the next Marvel movie being produced if it means giving everyone free access to all the other creative works that have already been published.
GNU's The Right to Read sounded utterly and totally laughable to me in circa 2000 when I first read it. A fanciable dystopia. It has come too close to reality in more recent years since.
Despite having some fairly questionable social views, Stallman has been living 40 years in the future for the past 40 years. Every time I read him, I'm saddened that nobody listened.
If you look up the word "browse" in a dictionary, you will see that it now has an entry relating to computer networks.
When we browse items in a library, we can see context, we can see neighbouring items. Even some of the library database software today allows you to do this on the computer, simulating the physical experience.
Maybe some of you can remember searching an item then going to retrieve it from the stacks and ending up just browsing the neighbouring items and discoevring even better items. I often discovered the best items through just browsing in a section, in the stacks.
This is one element that is missing from today's web. It is probably one reason why a search engine can become the most popular site on the web. The search engine controls the user's view of the web. The user cannot see the "stacks". Nor can she browse them as she would in a library to discover what is there.
Libraries impose an order that is missing from the web. Something like a Dewey Decimal classification system where a number reveals something about what is found in that location. IP addresses reveal almost nothing to us about the item(s) that may be found there; and whatever they reveal is not intentional. These numbers are in turn "hidden" behind potentially ambiguous names that sidestep the trademark system, another proven classification system, that serves to eliminate ambiguity and deception of consumers.
In the past I have seen some sites that listed the entire IP address space in numerical order where it was possible to browse at least some minimal information on each network number. These always seem to go offline eventually, as if they are breaking some rule.
Imagine going into a library where you were not allowed to visit the stacks or see neighbouring items, where the ordering of the items was a secret and all you could do is perform "keyword" searches. Imagine the results would not be ordered alphabetically, chronologically, or even by a known method of determining relevance (that too is secret). Imagine you could not sort the results or get a quick copy of all of them for reference. Imagine the library set the order of the results according to some "secret" methodology and preferred that you only view the first 5-10 items.
That's why you should never buy DRM-ed anything if you intend to keep it long term. Companies change, businesses get bought & sold, collapse, disappear - thinking that your particular DRM scheme would be supported for 20 years is insane. For a movie that you'll forget in the next 2 days it's ok, for a book that you intend on re-reading years late - no reason to "buy" DRM-ed version of anything. Or, at least, if you have no other options, strip DRM from it immediately and export into a common format.
I forget which store it was, but back in the day when I bought e-books to read on my PDAs they came encrypted, with the credit card number I used to buy them being the decryption key, so I was completely independent of the store to read them and could share them with anyone I trusted with my card number. It seems like a quaint solution to modern sensibilities but thoroughly satisfying on a moral level.
These days I buy the digital version on Amazon but don't download it. I pirate the copy I'm actually going to read and archive.
Some (few) stores offer DRM-free PDF versions, usually with a personalized watermark.
I feel like that's a good compromise, I get a DRM-free PDF and I can only share it with people I trust not to put it online. And the watermark is a non-issue because it doesn't bother/impact me.
People need to be made aware that "purchasing" something with DRM means that you aren't purchasing the item, you're only purchasing a revokable license to access the item though software controlled by the vendor.
In a way, it's good that we're actually seeing the predicted issues with DRM (losing books, etc.). Hopefully it will help raise awareness.
In the case of Kindle, you're usually paying more for the revokable license than you'd pay by moving your mouse 2 centimeters to the right and selecting a physical copy instead.
Search for DeDRM plugin for calibre. There's several ways to do it. If you have a physical kindle, you can download the books from your amazon account, and plug the serial number of your kindle into DeDRM. If you have the Kindle for PC or Mac app, DeDRM can pick up the relevent keys. I recommend getting the books in the AWZ3 format rather than KFX.
I couldn't make the desktop application ripping mechanic work. Apparently you need to download an ancient version which still uses AWZ3 since KFX wasn't support. I got lucky since I had an old gen one kindle on my account so I was able to download the files from my account portal but I think I would've been out of luck otherwise.
Ah yes,I have kindle keyboard (it won't die!) so maybe one will have problems with the newer versions? After installing Calibre plugins, simply double clicking to download books to my local library automatically strips the DRM.
We need someone to be the Carl Sagan for Stallman's philosophy. He's right a lot, but he's also abrasive and doesn't package his arguments in a publicly digestable way.
But Carl Sagan did not have a horde of anti-Sagans from the likes of Microsoft, Amazon etc to ridicule him. Really, this is the crux of the matter.
I have been to several Stallman talks and have had a chance to speak with him privately. He is weird in his manners, to put it lightly, and he is uncompromising in his positions, but he is very clear, very eloquent, very factual, and has a great track record at predicting the future.
You have hundreds of Carl Saganesque people fighting against big tobacco, hardly making a dent. The problem with Stallman is not that he is abrasive, it is that he is outnumbered by people trying to make money.
How many times does this need to happen, for people stop paying for DRMed junk? Buy digital goods DRM-free only. Vote with your wallet, otherwise it's pointless to complain.
I don't suppose anyone ever cracked the DRM on Microsoft books such that the De-DRM utilities for Calibre would work to scrub them before they're rendered inaccessible?
Back in 2005, my undergrad school gave students access to the then newly legit Napster. Everything was DRM-d WMA files, but there was a third party tool that stripped it out and let you play it on any device that played WMAs natively.
I'm reminded of that occasionally when I see files with "noDRM-$Artist-$Title" pop up in the File Manager. Does Napster even exist anymore?
I'm so shocked about this, my Iphone almost slipped out of my hands while I googled the Microsoft ebook store, but then I asked Alexa and she said everything will be ok. My Tesla is now driving me to an analogue bookshop to show my full support against dependence on digital platforms over my daily life, I might even upload a protest video to Youtube.
Tesla's software in the car is probably phoning home on a regular base. What happens if they pull the plug on those servers? You didn't buy that softare, you're only licensing it, after all.
> Remember: Free with DRM is not the same thing as free.
I agree with him the whole way that this is weird, but this particular tweet made no sense to me.
It seems akin to "Hey, we'll allow you to rent something for some duration for free", and it sounds like he's saying that that situation is also not free.
I understand it as two slightly different meanings for the word 'free'.
In French we have separate words for (a) 'free' as something we don't pay for (gratuit) and (b) 'free' as your have the freedom to use it as you wish (libre).
This book DRM thing also means that the online courses at my local college are more expensive than the normal ones. Because they use copy protected materials that self destruct at the end of the semester, there is no way to avoid paying full price by borrowing, buying used, reselling or stealing.
while i understand the general sentiment, this type of outcry and little quip is kind of silly, because it's too late. everyone knew what they were signing up for, and people still know what they're signing up for with kindle, itunes, netflix, and every other "you're just buying a temporary license" service. meanwhile, libraries in the u.s. are struggling despite being one of our greatest ongoing services. libraries are awesome, but they are having to redefine themselves (not necessarily a bad thing along some vectors) because people aren't using the books that are there. so in effect, the books already stopped working, but that doesn't make for good twitter hype.
and as far as killing off services go, giving full refunds is pretty rare and should be applauded.
I think that if something is DRMed like this the seller should be legally required to use the word rent instead of buy. And place the length of rental(licensing), which will require them to operate the server until that point.
They could have offered non-DRM copies of the books to people who purchased them and then closed shop. Giving refunds seems to be much more expensive than the alternative?
Imagine if one day you went to find your well-thumbed, most loved book in your bookshelf, maybe to re-read your favorite chapter, and the physical book was missing, replaced by a note from the publisher: "this book no longer works, but worry not: we've refunded you!"
Deleting books is a form of virtual book-burning. Yes, you can always buy another copy of the book (assuming that it's still being "printed"). But, that isn't the point.
I do find it interesting that Amazon decided to name their book reader "Kindle", of all things.
It doesn't matter whether it's unique. I'd find it outrageous if a book disappeared from my bookshelf on a publisher's whim even if the physical book was otherwise unimpressive -- even if, in fact, it wasn't a very good book to begin with. The book is mine. The publisher cannot decide when it stops working. Only a force of nature, like a fire, can take my books away from me.
If you're content in the knowledge that you can buy your e-books again whenever a publisher decides to make them stop working for you, good for you. Me, I'm not happy letting publishers win and trample my rights. In fact, much like the original tweet, I find the notion outrageous.
When Amazon switched Canadian kindle customers to a Canadian site, all the magazines they had purchased, and not yet read "stopped working." No refund.
"The books will stop working"? They were never "working" properly in the first place! There's a reason why DRM systems are said to be "defective by design"; DRM is inherently anti-consumer (in denying entirely lawful rights, such as format shifting and copying for the purpose of fair use under copyright law) and DRM-encumbered media of any sort should always be regarded as fake media.
Even ignoring the fact that physical books last for much longer than a decade, the alternative to DRM'd books isn't physical books. It's digital, non-DRM'd books. And the lifetime of a DRM-free digital copy of a book is practically infinite.
This is only really true for books published during a certain interval when high acid (wood pulp) paper was common. Before the late 1800s paper was typically made of other plant fibers ("rag"); by the mid-late 1900s de-acidified wood pulp paper was cheap enough to be common. Many books today still have a small remark in the front matter telling you that it was printed on low-acid paper and will last.
Pulp paper was much cheaper, which is how lurid mass-entertainment paperbacks came to (a) exist at all and (b) be called "pulp fiction".
I think you're being downvoted too much for this. It's a reasonable statement, and it's the premise of the licensing mechanisms libraries pay for with ebook subscriptions. Books have an average shelf life, you can compute the number of reads per copy and use that as a proxy for how much to charge a library to lend an ebook. (That's the premise anyways, there's plenty of politics to deal with too)
Luckily we still have places that still purchase printed books (along with ebooks) and you can go borrow them any time and they never stop working.... just ignore the damage from fire, water, rips, loss, bed bugs... maybe they do actually stop working for other reasons now that I think about it :-)