“The books will stop working.”
twitter.com
twitter.com
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 :-)
So yes, I can imagine, but who knows whose imagination is closer to "alternative reality"?
Further reading: The Library Book by Susan Orlean
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.
Definitely nothing interesting.
Unfortunately reality does not "inevitably" progress towards utopia, any more than the life of any individual does.
Just imagine physical books suddenly having EULA-like first pages that would forbid you from loaning them out. In fact, this has been tried before: https://law.stackexchange.com/questions/2059/why-were-books-...
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.
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.
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.
And yes, experience of relaxed intake with page turns in between does open a portal to another dimension!
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.
https://bubblin.io/cover/ladakh-by-satie-sharma#frontmatter
Disclosure: I'm the developer behind the project.
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.
Exactly! This results in _referential accessibility_ [1].
You might want to look up for the Superbook format [2] perhaps? Though not everything physics is required to be solved with it.
[1] https://bubblin.io/blog/referential-accessibility
Disclosure: I'm its creator.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Or what better way to signal a change in values than to stop having one on that same real estate.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnegie_Library_of_Washington....
https://archive.org/details/texts
My favorite part: It has actual scans of centuries-old books taken from many major libraries (NYPL etc).
I can read something printed and published in the 18th/19th centuries, on my iPhone. And I often do.
Books have lots of failure modes too. Wide distribution is one way to protect them.
My own hometown (only 15,000 people) had a Carnegie library.
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.
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.
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.
... GDPR? Granted, extraterritorial enforcement can be quite difficult.
...
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).
...
If your OPSEC is adequate, legality is irrelevant.
And if that seems shocking, consider that legality <> morality.
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.
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.
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…
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].
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YouTube_copyright_issues#2015%...
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.
Also, the US didn't respect any other country's copyrights or patents so anything published outside the US would be free immediately.
Cant imagine the US letting other countries get away with that now.
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.
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.
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.
FYI if you click that link and the referrer is hacker news it redirects you to a nice picture of a testicle in a cup, first thing in the morning.
(it redirects to : https://imgur.com/32R3qLv )
The link is fine, just don't click it from here -- well, unless cup-testicles are your bag. Pun intended.
What are you looking for? There’s a decent chance someone here lives near a copy.
They should be out of copyright by now. They are not.
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.
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.
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.
Piracy as a service, so to say.
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.
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.
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.
I think (relatively) inexpensive private planes wouldn't exist without grandfathered componements like say lycoming engines.
And it's been said many times cars that people can drive wouldn't exist if they were invented today.
And then there are guns.
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.
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.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_libraries_in_North_Amer...
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.
*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.
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).
This is a good reminder for me to make backups of the ebooks I do have.
(The website you want to reach is blocked due to the execution of a judicial or administrative order).
Ah the World Wide Web, less world-wide every day. I guess now if you don't use a VPN you're a second class netizen in many places.
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.
[1] http://www.norwescon.org/archives/norwescon33/vingeinterview...
Ask for a full refund and never ever buy anything from that company again.
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.
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.
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.
> 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?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/When_We_Were_Very_Young [1] It was first published in 1924
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?
So? Who cares? I don't think I ever read Hamlet. It was just entertainment, no different than a television show today.
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!"
It's about going obsolete. We don't teach people how to use an abacus anymore, or even write in cursive.
I'm not saying there's not a place for history, but it's time to stop fawning over things that happened 200 years ago and focus on more modern things.
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.
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.
We have our own culture now, we spend far too much time worrying about what the dead did with their limited free time.
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.
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 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
i carry your heart(i carry it in my heart)
-ee cummings
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.
You will see professors are already tying "classics" to current cultural products. Drawimg parallels, discussing patterns and influences.
We jumped from Nietzsche to Japanese manga.
It's not either/ or, it's both.
I was at SFSU and Amsterdam uni. YMMV.
This is also why I buy games on gog.com instead of steam if they both have them.
It's also simply an inferior technical solution due to its unnecessary complexity and dependence on servers, corporate entities/departments/decisions.
>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?
- 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:
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.
So I torrented it. Same goes for the movies that I can't legally watch any other way.
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.
>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.
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?
"[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."
https://web.archive.org/web/20060411095315/https://www.latim...
Microsoft's DRM on their own software is quite intentionally weak. Enforcement via audits (through its proxy arm, the BSA, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BSA_(The_Software_Alliance)), has been the preferred method.
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.
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.
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.
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.
https://www.cvedetails.com/top-50-products.php
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.
So Comcast customers feel respected? Feeling respected isn't the only variable at play.
>Anyone arguing otherwise is motivated by something other than facts, history, logic.
Its easier to ask, rather than assume.
Of course it is.
Who made most of the money during the Klondike Gold Rush?
(for just one such example)
The key is convenience. When it's convenient to buy, people buy.
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.
No DRM for iTunes Store where you can buy music.
Apple Music a streaming service, and that is DRMed (I believe).
DRM is a means of protecting IP by technical means. When legal means are more effective then DRM isn’t necessary.
If you take the legal recourse off the table then I think free Napster like services proliferate.
Seems to me DRM addresses this exceedingly poorly.
It did have a measurable (and positive) impact on sales. Not sure how much of a solution that is, but at least it worked this one time.
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.
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.
"yeah, we take back your transplanted heart but don't worry we will give a refund so it's not immoral"
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.
The problem is having DRM, not how the book authors are paid.
Some use this model already, for example Nine Inch Nails and Griz (may be wrong)
It's good that there's alternatives, but it seems like the alternatives are slowly diminishing.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/18mzcn/i_asked_steam...
Luckily, we still have torrents to help backup old games.
What about when Steam gets gobbled up by $other_industry_giant?
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).
Seems fair enough to me.
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.
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.
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.
Hitting the Molly Switch on a DRM service is the exact opposite.
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...
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.
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).
idk, spotify et al seem to be doing alright...
Buying a ebook is just for the payment.
That the bitstream of semantically meaningful content is identical appears to be the key issue. Why does it matter how you get there?
"No person shall circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title."
I assumed it passed. Looks like it didn't pass, because of the US laws.
A savvy lawyer might argue that’s not what’s meant by effectively, but it’s at least a little ambiguous.
> But if you are making a copy so that you may use a copyrighted product in case the original is stolen, damaged or destroyed, your conduct may fall within the doctrine of fair use. https://info.legalzoom.com/copyright-law-making-personal-cop...
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.
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.
Your average author doesn't have a choice in this, they have no clout to dictate terms to their publishers over the inclusion of DRM
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.
So yes, having books shut off sucks but so does piracy.
[EDIT] what I'm getting at is that DRM doesn't just fail to stop piracy, it also makes the pirated version much better than the original.
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 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.
One of the first things I learned as a teenager online was that anything that can be read, seen or heard can also be copied.
It's only with interactive things like games and programs that pirates have a real challenge.
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.
https://natecraun.net/articles/linux-guide-to-book-scanning....
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:Creating_a_DjVu_file
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.
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.
Sadly, you are dating yourself with that comment.
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.
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.
That's the kind of system draconian copyright laws create.
Yes losing all of those pretty girls sucks but so do volcanoes destroying the village...
Of course the world is more complicated than ideological arguments about individual sales. https://www.forbes.com/sites/emmawoollacott/2017/09/21/europ...
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.
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.. ! :)
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.
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...
https://web.archive.org/web/20060411095315/https://www.latim...
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.
Reasonable pricing has proved the best piracy.
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.
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?
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
A principled person would follow their own principles which may be different from yours.
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.
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.
Everyone says. Nobody does.
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?
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.
It's so sad that this is necessary.
...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.
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.
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.
From the introduction to Record of the Listener ( https://www.amazon.com/dp/1624666841/ ):
> 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.
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.
If you want your text to last, inscribe it high on a cliff: the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behistun_Inscription is still around and almost as good as new.
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 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.
If you've not been to Bebelplatz in Berlin to see Micha Ullman's sunken library installation[0], do try and get there.
It's one of the most upsetting art installations I've ever seen, but it absolutely should be on everyone's list.
[0] https://www.visitberlin.de/en/book-burning-memorial-bebelpla...
It’s one of several reasons why I mostly only buy paper books.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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).
and as far as killing off services go, giving full refunds is pretty rare and should be applauded.
I don't condone piracy, but if you buy an ebook, you should be able to read, store and personally transport it freely.
Games lost (hacks available to get around it do exist though, like you could hack the Microsoft books) even 100% free apps stopped working correctly.
For all OUYAs extreme self-righteous about open source they became the worst.
Perhaps a middle ground is needed
I wonder what the reaction would be if it said, "Lease Now!" instead?
All of my e-books are entirely replaceable by buying them again from a different store (or as a physical book).
If you only read bestseller list books then yes, but anything older or niche/technical may really not be available for sale anymore.
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.
I do find it interesting that Amazon decided to name their book reader "Kindle", of all things.
Book working = TRUE
Next
The British Library would like to have a word with you:
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/aug/27/british-librar...
Pulp paper was much cheaper, which is how lurid mass-entertainment paperbacks came to (a) exist at all and (b) be called "pulp fiction".