Digital Comic Publisher Quits, Customers Lose All Their "Purchased" Titles
jmanga.com
jmanga.com
It's also such a damn shame that genuine digital purchasing (as in, something that involves DRM-free downloads) is such a rarity outside the music industry. I just can't understand why every other industry (especially the video industry) thinks that offering DRM-free downloads would somehow kill them or whatever when digital music sales have only got better since the wide-scale ditching of DRM, especially since huge video files are much harder to share casually than small music files. There is value in the catalog subscription model that the likes of Netflix offers, but it should really have actual buying options available next to it (ideally, a service could combine both models - pay a lump sum for catalog streaming rights, then actually buy individual titles, and as a bonus, not only do you get DRM-free downloads, but you could also offer extras, formats that aren't possible with streaming, unlimited streaming rights for actually purchased titles since they have the available infrastructure for it, and so on).
There will be niche boutique artists creating dead tree books of obscure short stories and bad poetry, for phenomenal pricing.
A dystopian DRM future is not impossible, but generally I think people do want to "own" things, and eventually we'll see digital goods treated as such legally.
Now many games are unable to be sold on.
When I buy a DVD there is a clear benefit to me in being able to play that DVD in my player, no matter where I buy it. Yet DVDs are region locked. VHS tapes had Macrovision anti-copy signals; DVDs had region protections and CSS; BluRay has region protections and several layers of DRM; restrictions continue to get tighter, not more relaxed.
Laws are also getting stricter. The 1996 WIPO treaty (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WIPO_Copyright_Treaty) led to the introduction of the DMCA and similar laws in other regions. (Circumventing technical protections is illegal under the DMCA but it's also illegal throughout Europe, with various difference in each country).
I agree with "unlikely", but I'm not so sure about very unlikely.
[1] Japanese companies have been doing this longest, since SNES times. I think, but I could be wrong, that they managed to make second hand sales of games illegal. Maybe they just wanted to do that?
Only if those people have progressed beyond capitalism and big corporations having control over laws.
The level of "mainstream" penetration of such tools will depend on the level of DRM penetration. The more DRM will be pushed on people, the more commonplace the circumvention tools will become. In practice however the developing trend tends to be to use less DRM in various areas, so circumvention tools are kind of not very widespread either.
Nothing of value is lost.
Edit: it seems that again my post ends up as the wrong reply, it's for the grandparent, not the parent. :-S
Are you really so stuck on not breaking the law, just because it is the law? It is the twenty first century, everybody breaks the law either by downloading stuff or by driving too fast or by ripping a cd and putting it on an mp3 player.
So "ignoring DRM" may bea reasonable strategy, but you need to work on your laws to ensure that things that are both socially accepable and morally good (such as breaking DRM to make backups) are not criminalized.
(This page http://www.jmanga.com/hoshi-no-samidare-the-lucifer-and-bisc... is filled with "buy" this and that)
You could effectively ban DRM that depends on active servers or schemes like this where the content is always kept on theirs' by requiring them to post a bond sufficient to refund the customers who've been screwed. Not the full amount, but enough to compensate for value promised but not delivered. It would be essentially declaring it is not in the public interest to allow companies to play these games, but here's a mechanism if you're really determined.
Liability of some sort really needs to be established, and it would be wise for the companies playing these games to do something intelligent before extreme DRM becomes too toxic.
I don't think that matters. They're not in good faith selling ownership, because they're not selling ownership.
If ownership has changed hands, then the previous owner should not be allowed to retain control over the product. DRM, withholding of root passwords, forced updates, it really shouldn't matter. The owner should be the person of total control, and anyone interfering with that should be sent to court as a thief or intruder. This was after all the economic model in USA before DRM was invented.
It makes a weird kind of sense. I can sell the license to my physical copy of _Neuromancer_, but I cannot sell the contents (or claim to be the author) of _Neuromancer_.
1) Some books include a legal trick by adding a shrink wrap around the book. The claim is that by breaking such "seal", the owner of the book agrees to a legal binding contract (confusingly called a "License Agreement") with the book publisher. Such practice has a long history of being non-enforceable outside the United States, and a sketchy history within.
But you only have a limited licence to the contents. You can read them, under the Fair Use doctrine you could photocopy or otherwise use a few small excerpts to teach a class or use in your own writing, etc. etc., but you most certainly do not gain a licence to copy the whole book and give or sell copies of it, or to use this example, do the same with a derivative work like a translation.
Before you derisively dismiss this, you might want to take a look at their response to the cellphone unlocking petition: https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/make-unlocking-cel...
That being said, I don't view the cellphone response as particularly progressive. The way it parses for me is "we think your phone should be unlocked if you don't have a contract." It didn't address the criminalization of unlocking cellphones while under a contract. Maybe I'm wrong, and I'd love to hear if I am, but I've read it a few times and I can't find another way to read the response.
How about class-action lawsuits for fraudulent misrepresentations for businesses that use the word "buy" in deliberately deceptive ways?
And then one or two judges declare it "OK", and that's it.
And if it was likely to happen, wouldn't it happen anyway, even if there were new legislation involved?
In this example, we can be sure there are very few assets left in jmanga.com and it's entirely possible their liabilities will exceed those after they wind down their business.
At that point, you have to go after their backers. In this case its 10s of Japanese publishers, few of whom have US presences. Don't know the law there, but unless the publishers' lawyers were incompetent their liability is limited. I.e. an obvious way is to arrange a package deal to keep transaction costs low for jmanga to buy limited rights to publish derivative works as they did. On the other hand, if the publishers engaged in serious control over jmanga.com's operations there could be openings.
Given the foreign country aspect, Japan Inc. being very unfriendly towards lawsuits, and I suspect relatively small sales (their MVP wasn't particularly viable, and lots of people recognized the trap) I wouldn't expect anyone to try in this case. But I do wonder why no one has in previous cases like this, aside from avoiding going after behemoths like Microsoft when the potential payoff was probably very small (and e.g. Microsoft did offer a path to keep your songs, albeit at some quality loss ... and I can imagine a Microsoft lawyer asking a plaintiff "And you kept the volume turned up to 11? Let's get your hearing tested" :-).
After all, it's efforts that fail in the marketplace that are most likely to shut down; we probably need to wait until a big and for a while successful one goes down in flames....
But perhaps the court could at least issue an injuction requiring them to unlock the DRM, or find some alternative way of ensuring continued access to the goods they paid for irrespective of whether or not the company stays in business.
Going beyond that would be difficult and expensive. Certainly jmanga.com's licenses don't allow them to publish the content in other ways that would be accessible and yet limited and then there's practical matters, e.g. Amazon wouldn't likely play ball.
And then we come to the original problem I cited: there's no money to speak of to fund such difficult litigation. We're probably talking 8 figures minimum with all the expert witnesses needed, new case law to be forged, the foreign company angle, etc.
The one that clearly says they won't support unlocking cellphones under contract, and doesn't even address the outrage over criminal penalties?
"...neither criminal law nor technological locks should prevent consumers from switching carriers when they are no longer bound by a service agreement or other obligation."
>> Is there a way to download the manga I have purchased? It is not possible to download manga from My Page. All digital manga content will no longer be viewable after May 30th 2013 at 11:59pm (US Pacific Time)
If you care about issues relating to DRM, please spare a few minutes and take action by tweeting at your Congressional representatives. Not only should owner's rights be protected, but people should have the right to circumvent DRM systems when there's no copyright infringement.
I doubt that this will reach the eyes of most of the users being screwed by the DRM though...
On windows, navigate to:
Users\USER\AppData\Local\temp\acro_rd_dir
And create a >hard< symbolic link for the .tmp file you will find there, renaming it to .flv . I am sure, on a mac, the location name is similar.
Close the browser window, the tmp file will be deleted and the flv will no longer be locked for access, and is now yours.
http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/16226/complete-guide-to-symbo...
Whether that means abstaining is a personal choice.
I don't really have an answer for this. I feel guilty every time I buy a Blu-Ray, but I haven't stopped buying them either.
edit: and, oh, yeah, video games. Not all of them, but most of them.
And you can add to the list: rentals... Rent movies; hulu is free; pandora; etc.
At the end of the day it is entertainment. You really don't NEED any of it. And the free stuff is good enough.
I can assure you, you will not die if you don't get to play the latest version of Sim City (or any version of it for that matter).
I paid nothing for Hulu. They are more than welcome to delete anything and everything.
Or do you somehow imagine that those who give you something for FREE are required to do so indefinitely in the future?
But in any case, it's not just about deleting or not. Being only able to watch on other than "blessed" devices is important too, unless we want to further cement software monoculture.
You say: the problem is the DRM. Get rid of the DRM and we won't have the problem.
And that is a perfectly valid point.
But there is another solution you are completely missing: Why are you paying for DRM'd media?
No one is forcing you to purchase it. Someone created something, and they decided they wanted DRM in it. You (or more accurately, those customers) looked at it, saw the DRM, and said: here's my credit card number.
If you don't like the terms they are providing the service on, DON'T GIVE THEM YOUR MONEY!
So then you bring up Hulu. Hulu uses DRM. What are the solution here. 1) Go argue with Hulu about their DRM; or 2) Stop using it.
If you don't like the terms of a free service, stop using it. It really is that simple.
I don't give Hulu money. It's free. I think in exchange for free videos, they can put DRM in it. I didn't buy the videos, I know they aren't mine. I don't expect access to them in the future. If they go overboard with the DRM, then I'll stop visiting their site.
I don't think the history of music publishing supports that claim.
On the other hand it may be unique, e.g. the normal smallest granularity is a 3-5 or so minute song, AND the 33 RPM vinyl LP allowed publishers to move away from that (the 78 and 45 RPM formats weren't very long at all). Some of what we're seeing is a rejection of what turned out to be a fairly short lived business model.
That's facially nonsense. I pay for my apartment--it doesn't mean I own it.
You pay for the specific rights you purchase. It's morally wrong to bargain for one set of rights and use a broader set.
> If you bought it, you should own it.
If the "real" meaning if the transaction is "rent till we decide you can't anymore", then it shouldn't be misrepresented as a purchase.
it is a purchase, you purchased the rights to some piece of content for some period of time.
The real question is: are people aware of the terms of the deal? Are the aware of the specific rights they are purchasing when they buy DRM content? I think they are.
Explicitly presenting it as "renting" decreases the attractiveness, that's why DRM inclined distributors mislead their users with avoiding the usage of the "rent" term. But it only strengthens my point - since they rely on implicit perception of buying to attract people, people should treat this interaction as buying and these distributors should not complain when their DRM is scraped.
A license can be purchased, even if it does not carry all of the rights associated with the underlying product. A license can also be leased, in which case the license is of a limited duration.
A purchase of a DRM-protected good is a purchase of a license to use an IP on the condition that the usage is subject to a rights management policy. This is not a rental, because the license is not time-limited in the acquisition agreement itself. (Thus, even if the DRM servers were disabled the next day, it would not have been a lease--the terms of the acquisition agreement itself are what matter.)
That was my point above - when people buy, they don't care to buy any "licenses". They buy content. Those who sell it, fool them with selling a license, while making them think they actually buy what they want to buy (i.e. the content). I.e. in essence they lease them the content, while making people think they buy the content.
The key differentiating characteristic of renting vs buying is that in renting ownership of the expected good has not changed or has not fully transferred.
When you buy a good, legal ownership (whatever that means in any given jurisdiction) of that specific good has been transferred in full.
Entities using DRM are exploiting not the ownership transfer but the expectations for that good. The corporate, as it almost always is, transfers ownership of a substitute good which requires a license/renting to access the expected good.
The end users therefore have not bought the expected good, but a substitute good plus an access license "option". With DRM, this "option" can be (technically or legally) revoked or is callable at any time thereby disabling access or removing the expected good.
So, the obvious solution is not to buy a substitute good + callable option when you actually want the underlying (expected) good. Otherwise, you are just creating demand for substitute goods and all the fancy methods to create the callable options.
I can sell you an easement on my land. It's a purchase, not a rental. But it can be a very limited right nonetheless (e.g. Just the right to cut across the grass to the road). I can sell you a car on the condition you don't repaint it. I can sell you a piece of land on condition that you only use it for a certain purpose. These are all purchases within the common use of the term, even though they effect a partial transfer of rights.
In general, the whole notion of attempting renting the content obscuring it as a sale is not a honest way of doing things. And using DRM to enforce those rental limitations makes it even worse, since it uses unethical preemptive policing methods to do it.
The idea of the service it was actually interesting, and they perhaps had a better chance if it was all-you-can-eat subscription model as opposed to retailing.
A bit of shame especially after coming into the market with big fanfare of how all Japanese publishers joined the force making this possible... (and, it is plausible whole business model was dictated by influences of those publishers.)
In my opinon, JManga should be forced to continue to support their authentication systems or be forced to permanently unlock the content.
If I launch a web-app for example I don't necessarily want to have to support it forever.
a) regular proprietary apps.
b) regular open source apps that they don't have a community to continue them after the original coders lose interest, and you don't know enough programming to support them nor have the money to pay someone to work on them?
Yes, of course it is possible to deny yourself the ability to view content, use software, or access goods that you have purchased. That is beside the point, which is that webapps are inherently transient - unless you have access to the ability to configure and run your own server to host the application, the ability to use it can be revoked at any time, either through malice, negligence, or the regular operation of business. There are numerous examples of all three categories. This is, in fact, worse than proprietary software. At least with proprietary software (DRM/authentication notwithstanding), you have an executable, and it works on the machine you have right now. VM software like VMWare allows you to preserve a particular software configuration indefinitely if you wish, and access that software as long as you like.
If you advertise and charge a monthly fee for a service, you don't need to support it forever.
If you advertise and charge a one-time fee for "premium gold star membership" on your site, then you need to support it for the lifetime of your site, not forever.
But if you advertise and charge for a product or content, saying "Buy it now!!! Own this beautiful widget for only $9.99!" then you have the following options:
a) Hand over the product, take the cash and be happy; b) Instead of handing over the product, promise to show the product on demand, and keep your promise eternally; c) Sell a promise to show the product on demand, but don't actually do it - that's called fraud and should be prosecuted.
But noone is asking jmanga.com for eternal support - they can quit, but they have to deliver the paid-for goods if they want to stop providing on-demand access.
Are you allowed to rip the protection to keep access to something you've "bought"? Or is that circumvention and thus a criminal offence?
So, media types that use any DRM: why should I buy your product?
But being illegal hasn't stopped pirates yet, has it?
One major side effect isn't them trying to sway us; instead they are forced to release movies in the range of weeks, and not the traditional years. So yes, pirates are a competitive pressure downward.
Don't get me wrong: I think people should be paid for creative works. I like creative stuffs. I just disagree with putting locks on our culture, that are physically or legally hard to remove.
The last thing I want is more DRM peddlers catering to people who aren't in the know about every tech nuance out there. So yes, it can he unduly harsh. But in our legal environment (with little recourse), drm providers almost always deserve it.
An exception to that is companies that sell "drm" servers to authenticate that only X licenses of software are used at one time. License compliance is another drain on innovation, but can be effective in keeping legit in compliance.
Edit: Looks like you don't
The point I am more worried about here is that we are actually reliant to an extent on piracy and DRM stripping in order to preserve abandoned works.
With DRMd ebooks there are legal and technical measures in effect to try and prevent archiving.
I think there's an important difference between something being hard because it is and something being deliberately made more difficult that it needs to be.