1. This might focus people's attentions on the problems of buying DRM books - I am still astonished how little it bothers people.
2. For the love of all your deities, can we please revisit copyright laws. The man has been dead for 59 years. Surely we can all agree those books should be public domain by now. Death+70 is just too long.
http://www.informationweek.com/news/personal_tech/drm/showAr...
Somebody (third-party) decided to sell 1984 and Animal Farm on the Kindle Store without owning the copyright to it. Amazon is of course forced to take down said illegal posting. The only questionable part here is whether or not they should be allowed to delete purchased copies (with refund).
Then instead of informing the buyers of it's mistake, Amazon decided to delete the copies outright, without any notice and of course without any talk of refund to the buyers.
That's what I understand of this situation.
I think they handled it as well as anyone can handle this particular situation.
The book is 1984 for f sake. Does it have to be 451 before someone at amazon realizes this would be a PR nightmare? There were better ways to handle this issue, but they can still fix it, as they must have a record of which books from which customers they revoked & refunded.
1. Someone still has a copyright on this book. 2. That person can demand that everyone that bought a copy of it have their copy deleted.
...should prove that without question.
As a copyright holder of course you have the right to go after people who have illegally copied your work. I see nothing wrong here. What I see wrong is the ability to preemptively delete this material without notifying the user first.
Someone had the copyright and they were clearly able to have the works deleted. QED.
Maybe they weren't in their immediate legal rights merely by virtue of their copyright but their possession of the copyrights gave them enough other leverage to force Amazon to take the actions that they did. So by having the copyright, they were able to get the books erased.
The illegality of the book here has nothing to do with political pressure or information control. It is a simple matter of someone who didn't own something trying to sell what he didn't own.
So while "buy" isn't the right word, neither is "lease". It's a whole different beast altogether.
You can buy a car but you can't drive it 100 miles per hour. You can buy 1000 smoke detectors, but you can't harvest the radioactive isotope and make a nuclear reactor. You can buy a book on paper, but you can't re-publish it as your own work, etc.
If a song costs $0.99 with DRM then it would cost more without DRM. Very simple. In most cases the DRM terms of use are acceptable to me, which is why I don't hesitate to buy DRM'ed content.
Of course, many DRM implementations are highly annoying, but that is a design issue not a core issue with DRM technology.
In the vast majority of cases, DRM is only an annoyance. It doesn't stop anybody who really wants to share content from sharing it. The only things DRM does is give undue power to content sellers (like Amazon) and make content completely worthless when whatever technology is used to verify ownership stops working (or gets turned off like MSN Music, Yahoo Music...)
Why shouldn't I be able to plug my iPod into someone else's computer, pick the songs I want, and confirm a popup for the amount I'll be billed? Or why shouldn't it let me listen to the songs for a few days free of charge?
DRM should let comtent owners think of extremely creative ways to virally market digital goods, while still preserving ownership and the ability to make a profit.
Sadly, there has not been a good DRM yet. Even Apple's DRM is so stupid that if you get a hard drive failure you can't re-download the songs free of charge (or for the price of bandwidth). I happen to have had two hard drive failures, and only the first one was covered. This is bad business, not bad technology.
Since when does price have to do with how much something cost to build? If I spend $10 building a shitty chair, it's still a shitty chair. DRM-protected music costs less because you're buying the right to listen to a song with restrictions not present in non-DRM-protected music.
It seems that RIAA and MPAA are the luckiest of these middle men and the most persistent, and that is why they came to make such a huge profit from what was relatively obscure nook of an intellectual property regulation. After all, the concept of an artist having the privileged right to his, already published, work comes first, and all the delegations and copyright issues come second.
DRM is designed to keep power in the hands of rights holder, the creator, and, by necessity, away from the consumer, and only the monstrous bulk of MPAA allowed them to effectively pretend that they are not the simple middle men, but the focus and origin of all the rights that anybody can ever have on IP.
DRM is the sort of technology that could enable this kind of free, expressive creation. That we don't have it is a failure of businesses to come up with creative licensing terms, not a failure of DRM technology.
Another option would be to create a branch of IP "in between" copyright and trademark (which is indefinitely renewable).
But IMNAL, so it might as well be my ass talking.
But I suspect Disney isn't actually that powerful itself, but it has sufficient resources and motivation to argue its case strongly before the appropriate committees - and then the many other powerful parties with similar interests rally round it.
But I'd like to point out that the phrase "special interest" is very loaded. If you're going to use the phrase, can you differentiate between a "special interest" versus just a plain old regular interest?
It seems that people use "special interest" to denote interests with which they disagree. Those entities that they agree with are overlooked, despite the fact that all entities manifestly have their own interests.
(I hesitate to cite specific examples for fear of forking out an off-topic thread for an OP that's already marginal)
I would agree that getting too specific is best left to discussions on another site.
1. According to utilitarianism - the idea that the moral worth of an action is determined solely by its contribution to overall utility: that is, its contribution to happiness or pleasure as summed among all people [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utilitarianism]
I claim that in all but the most obvious cases, you can't. It's a fool's errand, and thus the term "special interest" has no use but in propaganda.
While used in propaganda, I meant to explain that "special interest" == "not in the public interest". I agree that the latter is clearer.
Interestingly, there are strong economic incentives for democracies to create policy that benefits special interests at the expense of the general interest.
A: Special interests.
The best format, IMO, is plain HTML. It can come with a custom style sheet, or can be overridden to taste on the client. It can be read by anything, it can be endlessly adapted .. it's just the best overall solution, IMO.