Quote:
Originally Posted by HarryT
If you want to loan your son your reading device, with the book on it, that's absolutely fine.
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And that, of course is the crux - when people talk about 'lending' an ebook, what they really mean is making a copy and handing that over. The author retains 'copyright', which is the right to control how copies are made and distributed, and that's what DRM is supposed to protect.
In my view, the issues are these:
1. Much copyright does not reside with authors/creators, but with corporations. It's much harder to make the case for protecting the originator's rights when he/she doesn't have any rights any more.
2. There is a moral issue (rewards for artists) and a commercial issue (protection of valuable assets) and both sides of the argument happily conflate the two to make their cases. Big Content loves to bleat about originators' rights, but has abused, and continues to abuse, artists routinely. The 'pirate' tendency use arguments about freedom and openness to justify the commercial activity of taking something for nothing. It's the combination of huge growth in sales of books, records, movies etc, and the concurrent growth in ease of copying that continue to fuel the fight. How many people who demand DRM-free copying rights now wanted the same when the only way to copy a book was to photocopy it page by page?
3. Ebooks are physical objects (files) and the seller is entitled to make his/her own terms for selling them, and if the terms include copy protection, so be it.
There are some interesting lessons to be learned from the case of the (excellent, award-winning) movie Sita Sings The Blues, created by Nina Paley. In essence, Nina gives the movie away free so as not to have to pay several hundred thousand dollars for some soundtrack songs whose rights are owned by corporations. In doing so, she's fuelled a fascinating (ongoing) debate about all of these issues. Google her or the movie to find out more.
Oh - and watch the movie it truly is wonderful