I was working on this last night, and gave up due to not being able to focus on the screen. Most of what I was saying has been addressed by others, but I guess I don't want to waste the work, so here goes:
Quote:
|
I can get books in epub from many sites and not have to use the DRM.
|
DRM isn't something you use; DRM is something that's done to your books to drastically limit the ways in which you can use them. For example, if you buy a paper book, you can read it anywhere you want to, you can sell it when you're done with it, you can lend it to your mother, you can donate it to the church rummage sale, you can prop up the couch with it ... whatever you want. When you buy a DRM-locked ebook, you can read it on your registered ebook reader. And that's ... all. For this, you pay twice the price of that paper book.
It's not a format issue. Both epub and pdf can be DRM-restricted.
It's an issue of whether or not you want to do business with a company that says "I know you're a thief, so I'm going to utterly cripple this product you're buying from me so you can't steal it like I know you want to, and I don't care if you can barely use it, because you're a thief and you deserve it" or one that says "I'm pretty sure you're a decent person, so I'm not going to screw you over just to make life marginally less convenient for the people who aren't; I trust you to deal fairly with me like I'm doing with you." I prefer to do business with the latter.
As far as black, gray, and white areas: Morally speaking, what is wrong is buying one copy of a book and duplicating it to give to others. That's true if the book is made of electrons or paper or clay tablets. Stripping DRM off the books you've bought so that you can actually USE them for the reason they're sold, and the reason you bought them, is not an immoral act. Depending on jurisdiction it may be an
illegal act. Then again, not all that long ago, historically speaking, helping a person to escape slavery was an illegal act, too. In Greece, unless they've finally changed that law, playing a computer game is an illegal act. Or here's a really loaded example: Depending on where in the world you live, either performing elective abortions or interfering with access to abortion clinics is an illegal act; no matter which you believe to be right, it's illegal somewhere. But the last I looked, right and wrong don't swap places when you walk over a line on the map. In short, laws define legal and illegal, not right and wrong. However, unlike morality, the law and its agents tend to inflict consequences.
Stripping DRM on something you have obtained legitimately (bought, were given as a free sample, whatever) is not wrong. Passing out copies of something you do not have the right to distribute copies of -- whether you've unlocked it from DRM or it never had any in the first place -- is wrong. They're two different issues.
For example, a while ago I bought a most excellent book entitled "Kai Lung Raises his Voice". It is DRM free (or I wouldn't have bought it). If I were to email a copy of that to you, that would be wrong. Also illegal, but that's not the issue; we're talking right and wrong here.
On the other hand, let's say I'd just bought Super Duper Bestseller from Sony instead. And let's further say (perish the thought) that my 505 gets stepped on, and (after I recover from my grief) I buy a new ebook reader that doesn't support the DRM that Super Duper Bestseller is locked into, or the format it's in. I bought the book. I paid for it. I still have it. But I can't actually
use it anymore. Depending on where I live, stripping the DRM so I can continue using the book I already bought and paid for might be illegal. However, it is most certainly not
wrong. I'm not stealing anything. I bought it. I'm just continuing to do what I bought it for -- that is, reading it -- just like I would have if I hadn't walked on my reader in my new hiking boots. Sony hasn't lost anything -- they still have my money. I haven't lost anything -- I can still read my book. Status quo. (and, incidentally, this scenario is one of the reasons why I
don't buy DRM-restricted ebooks)
Stripping DRM is not wrong. Distributing unauthorized copies of a book is wrong. The publishing industry tries hard to conflate the two because it's in their own best interest to make you buy all new ebooks when you buy a new device, just like it would be to make you buy all new pbooks when you buy a new house. It's obvious to everyone that the latter is insane; not so the former. That's why I rant about it a lot.
Another example of publishing industry (and even more so, software industry) propaganda is the supposed monetary value of sales they're losing due to the supposed widespread unauthorized copying. I'll use used books as an example: I'm sure you've read a few, right? You've been to a used bookstore, or you've bought some books at a yard sale, or someone who was moving gave you a box full they didn't want to take with them. Now, if you hadn't gotten those used books ... for instance, the so-so mystery I bought for $1 off the charity book table at my local supermarket a couple of days ago ... would you have bought each and every one of them in hardcover, at full cover price? Obviously not. But that's the presumption behind the claims of "losses": the idea that every teenage warez d00d who has a copy of Photoshop that he uses to put stupid captions on his Facebook pictures would have bought the full version of Photoshop CS5 at its full retail price (which is in the thousands) if he hadn't downloaded a cracked one somewhere. That's insane, of course, but that's how they estimate it. When it comes to books, if they find out that a package of 1000 books has been downloaded off some torrent 1000 times, they treat that as the loss of a million sales at $27.95 ... OMG, almost $30 million in losses! ... instead of the reality, where those 1000 people might have bought 5 books each, in mass market paperback, probably at a discount store, and the actual losses are more around $30 thousand. If that much. Remember our warez d00d with his cracked copy of Photoshop. If he didn't have that, he wouldn't even buy a cheaper alternative; he'd just use Paint, or some online photo editor, to caption those pictures (the ones he's going to be trying to make go away when he's looking for a job at a bank after college). But it's a lot easier to agitate for draconian laws, for criminalizing what has up until recently been a civil matter, and to justify crippling levels of DRM, if you can claim $30 million, or $30 billion, or $30 gazillion, in "losses", even those those numbers were pulled out of someone's, um, head.
So I try to avoid doing business with people whose presumption is that I'm a dishonorable person (I also try to avoid doing business with dishonorable people). It's not possible to avoid them all the time, of course, but it's possible to avoid them when you're buying ebooks, so I do. Friends don't let friends buy DRM-restricted ebooks.
And if for some reason I were to be stuck with one, I'd feel not the slightest trace of guilt in sanitizing it. I'm not planning to give it to anyone, so I'm doing nothing
wrong.
Incidentally, one handy use of calibre: Since I only buy DRM-free ebooks, there's nothing technological that would prevent me from accidentally packing them up with a bunch of legitimately copyable ebooks that I'm giving to someone. So in calibre, they're all tagged "paid", and if I'm looking through my calibre library for books to share with a friend, I just set it to display only books not tagged "paid" so that I can be sure not to get them mixed in by mistake.
A note about freedom: There are two kinds, famously described as free as in speech, and free as in beer. Free beer is
gratis -- it's free in the sense that you didn't pay any money for it. Free speech is
libre -- it's free in the sense that you have the right to do what you want with it. It's possible to have something that's
gratis but not
libre -- a "free" book from the Sony store, for instance. You don't pay anything for it, but it's DRM-locked. And it's also possible to have something that's
libre but costs you money -- you might, for instance, pay for a compilation of GPL-licensed software because you'd rather have it on CD, maybe with some paper documentation, than spend the time to go to each company's or developer's website and download it individually. Waaaaay back in the day (as in the pre-Web day), I used to get my Project Gutenberg books that way. They were still
libre, but not
gratis. So when you hear about something being "free", you need to make sure which version of the word they mean, as English is distressingly unclear about that.
And yes, I'm feeling considerably better. Note: concussions really suck. Don't get one.