Stallman: EBooks are "attacking our freedom"
pcpro.co.uk
pcpro.co.uk
I'm publishing my Python tutorial on leanpub (a great idea which I plug whenever I can) and it's DRM free and available on many formats:
http://leanpub.com/learn-python/
You just buy the book once and you can download as many of the formats as you want, whenever you want, and if I update the book you get all subsequent versions for free. You can back it up and share it with your friends (maybe that's illegal, but you have my permission to do it with my book), etc.
A physical book is undeniably a good. But what about an eBook? An eBook is arguably a service -- you pay for the right to have a the words of the physical book show up on your little screen.
DRM'ed books seem, to me, like buying a dead tree book, but only being able to read it on a particular kind of desk, or using a particular kind of lamp, each probably made by the book publisher. And yeah, that little detail about not being able to sell it, or even give it away once you've read it.
Capitalism is held together because of this notion called private ownership of property. The notion of private property is very important and there is no gray area - you either own something and it's your property, or you don't.
Except for copyright (which should really be reinvented because it's no longer relevant in its current form), you own copies of dead-tree books, with which you can do anything you want, including reading it 30 years later, lending it to others, sell it for huge sums of money (if you can find a buyer) or set it on fire in protest :)
And I'm all for content authors to be properly rewarded, but using "buy" as if you're going to own that book is more deceiving than ever, and people have a right to know what they are getting into.
It's been easy to be intellectually lazy up to this point, saying a printed book is a good because it feels nice to hold in our hands. But maybe it's actually always been a good (the words, the story) combined with a service (the paper as a delivery method - and looking at the attention in publishing paid to paper quality, bindings, design, etc seems to bear that out). Now we're just seeing the service part be delivered in an overtly separate way.
These changes need to be evolutionary, publishers need to be persuaded (or forced) to make this change, no one has the leverage for that today. I hate DRM as much as the next guy, but this is a stepping stone, it isn't "attackin" anything.
If your issue is with all digital distribution, I'm not sure I can help you.
edit: typo
(Personally, I don't think ebook companies should even be allowed to use the term "buy" with their books since that is not what you are actually doing; instead of "buy this book" it should say "license this book".)
I mean, if it bothers you then don't buy ebooks (I don't, personally, because I like having the physical copies on my walls... I collect 'em in the same way that hunters used to collect animal heads, as trophies... I also don't shelve 'em until I've read 'em). But I really can't see what the big fuss is about re not being able to sell them, and one might almost think that all this anti-DRM stuff is about frustrated pirates rather than folks who want to do legit things.
And Stallman is right. You have fewer rights with ebooks than you do with real books.
Edit: I forgot to mention that some libraries already offer borrowing of eBooks. So some of them have seen the direction of things, and instead of resisting, are adapting.
Also: tax dollars are a per-country thing, whereas popularity is often global. It would make sense for countries to try and free-ride and get other countries' books for free and pay their authors nothing. For instance Australia could happily pay nothing to authors and let the US and UK pay them.
Now that books are digital, I guess we need to do it again.
Second hand sale and lending of physical books would have been outlawed if it destroyed the whole book sale economy. I always see comments on here and on reddit that imply that people are too dumb to realize that ebooks are analogous to physical books, but that is a seriously absurd claim since they are so trivially similar; the difference in their legal treatment is rational and pragmatic not an evil conspiracy by publishers.
That said, any company which treats their customers like thieves will turn some fraction thereof into such.
I'd be out there complaining if actual capabilities were being taken away from me, but they aren't. Ebooks are a new class of product, and they work under slightly different rules from physical books.
And speaking as someone who has owned some of his books for decades, I worry about the long term implications of owning a collection of books encumbered with DRM.
I can lend physical books to friends, I can sell them when I'm done with them, I can buy them cheap from others who are done with them. That's freedom. And that's what the books I have the opportunity to buy on my Kindle lack (ability to lend some Kindle books in a lame way aside).
No matter how many more books I have on the Kindle because ebooks are cheaper, the only freedom I have with them are to read them on devices that Amazon decides to support and to lend my whole Kindle to someone to let them read something.
I'm not arguing against the notion that you should be able to do what you want with something you've purchased. But every business model ever conceived limits freedom in some way, and the echo-chamber argument that's put forth here consistently fails to take into account the fact that ebooks (and the business models that accompany them) have the potential to increase freedom by promoting reading.
At the end of the day, nobody's preventing you from buying a paper book; if you want to lend the book out, buy the paper version. Simple.
Also, can you name a device that Amazon doesn't support, apart from the Nook? I frequently read my Kindle content on the Kindle itself, my two PCs and my Mac, and my Droidx. I could also do it on any tablet (if I owned one), or my wife's iPhone.
Not to mention, you can read any non-DRM content you want on the Kindle.
And it's not that more utility == more freedom. It's that easier-to-self-publish is going to lower the barrier for people to create niche content by bypassing the big publishing houses. It's also going to create lower priced books overall, as well as more and better free content.
I also personally think it's only a matter of time before the publishers realize what the music industry has mostly realized after a decade: DRM doesn't work. I think it will slowly phase itself out. Just a guess, though, YMMV.
Compare to buying that book on Kindle. If the savings are more than what your net cost is in the physical case, you come out ahead, because on the Kindle side you don't actually get rid of the book. At most you stop syncing it to the device. If you later decide you want to read it again, you don't have to go out and buy another copy.
Even for books that you would not sell, Kindle can be a win on freedom simply by being cheaper. I'm free to read more books if I'm spending less per book. It then becomes a matter of weighing the options. Go with physical books, and I don't have to worry that maybe some legal snafu will result in my books ceasing to function. Go with Kindle, and read more books for the same money.
What Stallman overlooks in most of his arguments is that many of us are adults. We are capable of considering the alternatives and deciding which of the competing freedoms are most important to us.
So in practice, there's no real difference.
The trouble is that doing so is a violation of the DMCA, which can result in criminal charges.
So the simple act of keeping a DRM-free copy (to prevent Amazon from yanking it off your Kindle), or lending it to a friend, etc. opens up all kinds of potential problems in theory.
http://stallman.org/articles/internet-sharing-license.en.htm...
Australia, Canada, the US and the UK spend lots of public money on books, paintings, plays, concerts and broadcasts. Stallman wants to abstract over media, and pay according to law instead of ministerial taste. That makes sense to me.
Remember that copying is only an issue if you publish. You can charge whatever you want for the privilege of seeing your unpublished work. If you'd lose money by publishing it, don't.