U.S. libraries are battling high prices for better e-book access
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Content licensing, as opposed to outright sale, is a cancer spreading through our collective culture. Ownership will cease to have any meaning at this rate.
Written up two decades ago by Mark Lemley, Terms of Use, https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=917926
The future envisioned by DRM is an attempt to deal with the problem of copying through structural rather than legal means. Would an update to the law restrict DRM by putting transferability requirements in place (that is, any DRM scheme needs to have the option to irreversibly transfer the content)? Would it put further DMCA-style restrictions on attempts to circumvent DRM?
I don't really like any of these options. I think music is the closest thing to where we have "solved" this problem -- streaming music is inexpensive enough and widespread enough that music piracy is essentially a non-issue.
For a while it seemed like video was going in a similar direction, but now with the balkanization of video platforms and the increasing cost of access to materials, we're slowly reverting back.
Books, especially ebooks, have been totally blocked from this path by the publishers, who managed to successfully defend their pricing moats and make ebooks more expensive than their physical counterparts. Piracy seems (anecdotally) less widespread just because ebooks (especially Kindles) don't make it easy to bring your own content.
1. Resales and lending are built into the platform.
2. Some kind of trust or legal framework so that you can't lose access even if the company operating the platform goes bankrupt.
3. Assets are portable between platforms.
4. Strong legal privacy guarantees.
We mostly don't have stock certificates anymore. They're all electronic assets. But you still own your shares and they can't be freely copied or counterfeited. Why can't we do that for digital intellectual property?
Just like financial crimes will always exist[1], it isn't possible to stamp out piracy. That doesn't mean we have to make everything suck for everyone else.
1. https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/optimal-amount-of-fra...
(Please, no one say blockchain)
[0] https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=61364#:~:tex...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proof_of_stake
The users of BTC also pay for that electricity consumption, and value is derived from having a ledger that is not controlled by any government. Building out clean energy sources is the real solution like nuclear, deep geothermal, solar, wind, etc.
Until we have >100% renewable all the time all the extra energy used by BTC only causes more CO2 positive sources to produce energy, if miners weren't using that electricity we'd be closer to full renewable energy today already.
The actual value of the existence for the sake of having an alternative 'currency' is also highly suspect to me as the deflationary endgame of BTC is very bad for people hwo are day to day spending most of their income. Deflation is great if you got in early and have large reserves you can sit on but for most people who would earn and spend in BTC mostly deflation is terrible. There's good reasons we moved away from the gold standard which BTC tries to recreate in digital form.
As Gabe Newell said of piracy, "piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem".
By and large, most people want to do the right thing to consume media. If you try to make it really hard to do that to stamp out the pirates, then you're just going to encourage the piracy market. But you can see services like Steam or the various music streaming apps that really did a lot to crush the piracy market just by making legitimate consumption easy. (And you can also see that the attempts by various streaming services to make walled gardens for video stuff that when you make it harder, piracy goes back on the uptick).
I mean, Cede and Company owns most (all?) of my shares[1]. That's a model that could work --- let a specialist company setup accounts to buy games, and then control access to those accounts. If you want to 'buy' a game, you ask your broker to ask Cede and Co to get you an account, and when you want to 'sell' it, you ask your broker to ask Cede and Co to change the password and give it to a new 'buyer'.
You can do it individually, but a steam account per game is cumbersome.
[1] Well, I have vanguard traditional mutual funds, mostly in vanguard traditional accounts... they might keep the records for those directly in their own books.
Music has "solved" the problem of updating the first sale doctrine in so far as it's pushing to remove the option of ownership altogether.
Sounds fine to me. I don’t think that publishers should be allowed to interfere with transferability by technical or legal means.
Have we solved it? Streaming platforms are great as a consumer, but they have serious drawbacks: some content is just not available there, content can disappear from your "library" or playlists due to licensing changes, and the economics stack the deck against smaller artists in favor of "unicorn" successes.
Sure, it's possible someone can cheat the system. But that cheating is as illegal in that state of affairs as it is in the current state of affairs. And it's not like the current state of affairs has been all that effective in preventing such cheating!
"I promise to delete the copy from my drive, cross my heart, hope to die" is a lot more iffy. How do you verify that? How could you possibly even go after any cheater? Respectfully, I think you're being too dismissive and naïve about this because abuse will be rampant and widespread with zero recourse.
Is this a foolproof system? Hell no. It's not even that hard to cheat. But most users aren't terribly tech-literate in the first place. And also, most people tend to want to comply with the law. I quoted elsewhere Gabe's comment about piracy--it's primarily a service problem, and the evidence has generally shown that if you deliver the services that people want, the piracy rates plummet.
Sure, why not?
> Would it put further DMCA-style restrictions on attempts to circumvent DRM?
No, why would that be necessary?
I don't feel I understand what you see as so complicated here.
Who says that there "needs" to be a serious update? You? This is emotional pleading without any substance.
> It's too important a principle for us to lose.
This is false. The rise of Steam and other digital distribution platforms for video games has almost completely eradicated the second-hand market - with virtually zero negative consequences. The real-world nullification of first-sale doctrine for an entire class of digital media extremely clearly illustrates that there have been few, if any, negative consequences for it.
> Content licensing, as opposed to outright sale, is a cancer spreading through our collective culture.
Now you're mixing two very different problems. Problems of being able to re-sell copies of copyrighted material is distinct from ownership. (the fact that a small part of ownership is the ability to sell to other parties is largely irrelevant)
And it's hard to capture for normal people, but the pain of digital ownership is pretty evident to every person I know. Granted that's still a very small sample.
Nobody can convince you, but you can't claim the opposite too
I mostly agree with you, but it's important to differentiate between two different things that Steam is doing:
The first is the nullification of first-sale doctrine, which is what the GP comment was about - you can't re-sell Steam games, and this is OK.
The second is the fact that your entire game library is tied to Steam - beyond merely being unable to re-sell your games, you can lose your games if Steam either goes down or decides to delete them from your library (like Sony and Amazon have done with their respective digital libraries). That is unacceptable, and I fully support legislation to prevent things like that from happening. (e.g. I'm in favor of bills that say that if the servers are shut down for an online game, the developer must provide all the tools for players to host their own servers)
But, my point is that the two concerns are separate. You can believe that people shouldn't be able to re-sell digital content without believing that the digital store owner gets to delete content at will, or that it's ok for you to be unable to access hundreds of dollars of games that you paid for because the DRM servers are down.
And there is the fact that you can be banned by these platforms and lose all your purchases
Reverting copyright term from the current insane state (in the US) of "70 years from the author's death" would allow that. Copyright in the US was originally under 30 years[1], but has been progressively extended by corruption and lobbying. If the copyright term was reverted back to 30 years, then games that you played as a teen would be in the public domain for your children to play in their early twenties (assuming you had kids around your late twenties). If copyright term was shortened to 25 or 20 years, then your kids could definitely play the same games in their teens as you did.
And, this was the original point of copyright - to allow for a time-limited monopoly on copyright and distribution of a work to allow the creator to get compensated, while ensuring that the work would eventually pass into the public domain and enrich the cultural commons. I'd much rather have a prohibition on "passing down" games, but have those games just become public domain for my kids to play, then allow "inheriting" copyrighted works/licenses, but have those works not appear in the public domain until after I'm dead.
> And there is the fact that you can be banned by these platforms and lose all your purchases
Yes, I completely agree that this is a problem that needs to be fixed. My point above was that Steam's existence and destruction of the second-hard market for games, with little downside, was proof that we didn't need to adapt first-sale doctrine for electronic media. However, that's completely separate from the fact that yes, if Steam bans you, you lose all your purchases. I whole-heartedly support legislation that gives you strong rights as to ownership of digital media - e.g. if your account gets banned, the platform provider is legally required to give you tokens to redeem to play your games somehow (which, if necessary, means DRM-free direct download - which I assure you will be an extremely strong incentive for platforms to never ban people).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_copyright#/media/Fi...
I don't exclude the possibility that resale could exist (if I sell the whole account, for example), and the concept of borrowing games might be nice, depending on the pricing. For now, the family view allows me to live happily.
The recent huge improvement (still in beta) is that family library is made of all the games in the family, multiple copies included, and finally the lock of the library is not global, but per game. This essentially fixed my major complaint with steam, the second one being that I want my children to inherit my account (I love videogames, I want to give them my collection)
Why do you think it's trivial? I'm asking sincerely here.
We need to protect our regional library systems from extractive PE firms. Libraries (even those in large metro areas) have very little negotiating leverage against global conglomos like KKR.
Nearly 90-95% of library e-book systems are controlled by KKR-owned Libby/Overdrive.
https://www.google.com/finance/quote/KKR:NYSE
The funny thing is all the governments that are spending more money on libraries due to higher ebook prices also own shares in KKR via the taxpayer funded defined benefit pension plans for government employees.
But the model is just kind of broken and never made any sense. Even the idea of "loaning" ebooks never really made any sense. The operation of "lending" an asset has two parts; once where it is given, and one where it is returned. Given a medium where perfect copies are essentially free, it is easy to "give" an ebook, but incredibly difficult to "take it back".
And the fact that it's associated with a local library is just kind of a silly fiction to keep friction artificially high.
- QR code or similar embedded in books, for people to tip
- Patreon style subscription for your favorite authors (like how some youtube channels do it)
- Use it as a loss-leader to go on "talks" tours (like musicians)
Not perfect ideas, but something has to change. Our laws today are creaking under the load.
Copyright is a mess and its mere existence pisses me off sometimes, but it sounds even worse to expect someone to be so unable to make money from their work that they have to use it as an ad for doing _more_ work.
I fully support authors who want to do that, but I also support authors who don't.
Once they have the following then they have a good shot and making some money, maybe even a living.
I’m not saying one is morally right, but in a world where content can be infinitely duplicated it’s tough to see how margin per unit will hold.
> - Patreon style subscription for your favorite authors (like how some youtube channels do it)
Some self-published authors do this. It can work, although I find most self-published stuff to be pretty middling quality. There are a couple downsides.
First, this can give your subscribers unreasonable expectations, like say demanding a book every 4 months, when a lot of authors don't work on a schedule like that. Authors used to write serially, publishing chapters or sections in newspapers, but most people can really tell those authors were always working by the seat of the pants and a lot of novels from that time period are kind of rambling messes. The rare ones worked and are remembered, but there were 100s that were just messes.
Second, a lot of self-publishers forgo good, professional, editors in order to save costs. For some people, this isn't that big of a deal, but I usually find that the main problem with self-published stuff is a glaring lack of a good editor (even copy editor at times). With traditional publishing, authors are more like talent drafted by editors, who have their salary paid by the publishing house and insure that the book meets the "house standards" of editing. Aside from the marketing and distribution of your book, getting your book published by a big publisher was also a sign that your book passed through a certain scan of quality before publishing.
> - Use it as a loss-leader to go on "talks" tours (like musicians)
This was (kind of is still) also common back in the day. Most authors go on book tours. Some made money, some made barely any. Nowadays they're wrapped up with selling books, so in order to get a ticket to a book talk you need to buy a copy of the book as well. Unfortunately, like music touring, a lot of the infrastructure that supported these kinds of tours have either disappeared or become really expensive such that only already famous authors can really use them to make money anymore.
Those laws were mostly made before perfect digital copies, but also before digital enforcement and "licensing“ instead of ownership.
After 20 years everyone's gotten paid and can move onto other projects.
I can never imagine this happening though. It's too profitable to keep milking the rare hit IP for decades. For example, Harry Potter has already made JK Rolling a billionaire. She'd be fine if the books went public domain.
So many works will be lost since they're no longer available legally. All that artistic effort, gone.
You’d probably have to grandfather in copyrights made before the law went into effect. Too much money tied up in the long-tail of prior works.
The tragedy here is so much will simply disappear. Original publisher doesn't want to do a re-issue, how will you access it in 30 years?
A movie on VHS seems entirely reasonable to convert to DVD or w/e so long as you don't then sell the VHS while keeping the DVD.
Image not being able to frame a poster because it didn't come in a frame to begin with.
There are a variety of arguments used to justify copyright, ranging from philosophical to economical, and I can't think of any of them whose validity or lack thereof depends on whether or not copies are perfect.
If more people start showing up in the libraries and use them - they'll continue to flourish. If they become a Netflix for books - they're not going to survive.
I highly doubt that the working poor are the ones doing most of the e-book borrowing.
This I suppose?
After Fierce Debate In House, Digital Books Bill Is Tabled
https://ctnewsjunkie.com/2024/05/01/after-fierce-debate-in-h...
Libraries struggle to afford e-books, seek new laws in fight with publishers
1. Marketing 2. Floating financing for editing, rendering, etc.
Did I miss anything? This just seems like the same 'ol trope of leveraging capital to take future returns wildly disproportionate to the value actually added. Marketing is no longer as necessary with social media—we just need a way to support artists while they work independently of predatory entities.
But that's relatively minor in the big scheme of things, because most published books are also unread.
As far as I know, book publishing isn't a high-margin business. Fronting capital to publish an author is quite risky and they deserve to make a profit. What they cannot be allowed to do is choke off ownership and make us all renters.
E-book publishing certainly is or there would be more bullet points to add to my comment above. The only way this could not be the case were if they were addicted to investing in authors that didn't produce revenue—certainly possible, but I don't see any indication of this.
Based on the error riddled books I see nowadays, they're not investing much on editors.