[pilotbob]

Ok,

As I was reading the Teleread blog I came up with a new idea for "social" DRM. It's more like quiltware type scheme.

This will take two phase attack. The first is to standardize on copyright length for all books to some time frame from the books publication date. This is probably the hard part of this idea.

The second is that ePub and all eBook formats should have a spot for publish date. From the publish date when a reader (device) opens an eBook file for the first time it will calculate the public domain date of the book, example, Publishdate + 40 years. If the current date is 40years or more after the publish date all will continue.

Otherwise a warning will be displayed that the book is a copyrighted work and won't be freely available until <DATE>. If you didn't obtain this ebook legally you should delete it. Then the prompt will ask to Read or Delete with "Delete" as the default. If you say read it will read the book and flag the file in some way so the warning doesn't appear everytime you open the eBook.

I am thinking that alot of people that download eBooks from the net might not know that the book is illegal. While it won't deter someone that doesn't care it will deter the honest people.

Other extensions could be added to ePub, perhaps to indicate if the eBook was donated to the Public Domain or uses some type of "free to copy" license. If this is the case the warning would not be displayed even if the date with not more than 40 years ago.

Thoughts?

BOb