Arguments For And Against DRM

[ApK]

Originally Posted by tompe

I did not say that. I said that the legality of lending the book is not affected by my having a copy or not.

Then you are utterly missing, or more likely, intentionally obfuscating, the point.

[tompe]

Originally Posted by ApK

Not logical. Lying, for example, is fundamentally dishonest, by definition, even when there are no laws against it.

No, it is not. Only if you are a Kantian. In other moral systems lying is not fundamentally dishonest. I assume then that dishonest has a meaning that you ought not to to something that is dishonest.

[tompe]

Originally Posted by ApK

Then you are utterly missing, or more likely, intentionally obfuscating, the point.

What point?

I thought that the point was that having a copy would make the action av lending the book different in the way that you ought not to lend the paper book. But that is not the case.

And we have been told her that making a paper copy of a paper book is not copyright infringement in the US so what is the problem with first making a copy and then lending the paper book?

[ApK]

Originally Posted by latepaul

We really need to start recognising that ebooks are a different kind of thing than paper books and that whether or not we want to allow similar types of behaviour (such as lending) is a separate question (and will necessarily be achieved in a different way).

Originally Posted by latepaul

Note, I'm not talking about whether I think this is right or wrong, or whether it causes harm or loss of sales. I'm simply trying to point out that a) it is illegal and b) ebooks and pbooks are not the same.

The later is something of a hobby-horse of mine because I strongly believe that unless we settle this we can't have sensible discussions about what we should and shouldn't be allowed to do. This is true regardless of where you stand on the ethics of lending and the possible harm it causes.

F'in-A, Bubba! Hallelujah!

("One of us! One of us!")

[ApK]

Originally Posted by tompe

What point?

I thought that the point was that having a copy would make the action av lending the book different in the way that you ought not to lend the paper book. But that is not the case.

Lending the ebook in the way we are talking about explicitly involves making an illegal copy, or else it could not happen.

The ebook analog to what you described would be making and keeping a pirated copy of an ebook for yourself, then later buying a Kindle copy and using the official Kindle lending mechanism to lend it to someone, and then only talking about the lending part.
You (and everyone else) can plainly see that's not what we're talking about.

And we have been told her that making a paper copy of a paper book is not copyright infringement in the US

Says who?

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by Catlady

We're talking about the rules that apply to e-books, not the entire universe of rules and regulations. We are told not to format-shift. We are told not to share copies. But you blithely disregard the first, yet refuse to see any gray area whatsoever in the second. You think a pirate is a pirate is a pirate, whether a person shares one copy with Aunt Mary, or shares 50 copies with friends and relations, or uploads to a file-sharing site for the entire world.

I'm suggesting that you don't get to draw the distinctions and apply them to everyone when your hands aren't exactly clean. You say removing DRM causes no harm to anyone? Of course it does; it allows you to keep an unauthorized version of the book, it allows you to change the text of the book, it allows you to avoid buying another version of the book to read on a different device.

And even if you pooh-pooh the harm of removing DRM, I can argue that my sharing a copy with Aunt Mary causes no additional harm, even though it creates an additional copy, because as a practical matter it is equivalent to a loan of a physical book.

If you can see no moral difference between removing DRM and format shifting, to allow you to make free use of legally-bought books on different devices, and piracy, where you are taking it upon yourself to give copies of books to people who have no right whatsoever to have them, then I'm afraid that we are such poles apart that there's no point in continuing this discussion. I find your suggestion that DRM removal can in any way be equated to piracy to be utterly ludicrous.

[mandy314]

The mind is in a spin reading the last few pages of this thread.
Thought that we agreed at least on 2 points:
- intellectual property is a good worth protecting
- the situation with ebooks (digital content) and all the restrictive laws, regulations, rules, terms is somewhat a mess as it is still easy to "steal intellectual property"/infringe on copyright given digital content

That a good number of us could be termed a "closet law breaker or copyright infringer (is that a word) or term violater" is tragic-comical - that's me saying "welcome in the club".

My hobbyhorse is the assumption that the only benefactor of the situation are the handful of big ebook vendors getting us in their walled gardens. But that's not the point of my post.

Please look at this:

WikiLeaks Release of Secret Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPP) - Second Release
Intellectual Property Chapter for All 12 Nations with Negotiating Positions (May 16 2014 consolidated bracketed negotiating text)
https://www.wikileaks.org/tpp-ip2/

May give you a taste of things to come.

[DiapDealer]

Originally Posted by ApK

F'in-A, Bubba! Hallelujah!

("One of us! One of us!")

I fail to understand the relevance of wanting to establish a "baseline" that nearly everyone involved already understands. Of course, by the letter of the law, making an unauthorized copy is copyright infringement. And if someone wants to narrowly define "piracy" as any violation of copyright whatsoever, then they're free to do so (and I'm free to find it ridiculous).

What's being currently discussed is the tendency for some to treat their own conscious decision to break rules as a Rosa Parks act of of civil disobedience, while treating someone else's conscious decision to break rules (by lending Aunt Mary a copy of an ebook) as treason on the high seas. All based on some subjective opinion of "harm" that they can neither guarantee their acts can't cause, nor prove the other's actions will.

The idea that someone can guarantee that their removal of DRM will never cause harm (in the form of copyright infringement or—dare I say it?—piracy) is ludicrous.

Is it within the realm of possibility that a device/drive that contains your "liberated" ebooks could be stolen? Would it be more or less likely for those ebooks to end up on a pirate site if their original DRM was still intact?

Have you ever plugged a device/drive that contains "liberated" ebooks into hardware that wasn't yours? Can you guarantee that data wasn't cached? How useful would such potentially cached data be if the original DRM was still in place?

Have you ever stored your "liberated" ebooks on any hardware that wasn't under your direct control, such as cloud-based storage, or any other online host whose hardware wasn't under your direct control? How much more or less likely would the potential theft/hacking of such data result in pirated ebooks if they were still DRMed?

Ever emailed a liberated ebook to one of your devices? How much control do you have over the email servers it passed through along the way?

All I'm (and others) are saying is for certain people to stop claiming that they know their violations can't "harm anyone" while simultaneously claiming that the other's violation has to "harm someone".

[shalym]

Originally Posted by HarryT

If you can see no moral difference between removing DRM and format shifting, to allow you to make free use of legally-bought books on different devices, and piracy, where you are taking it upon yourself to give copies of books to people who have no right whatsoever to have them, then I'm afraid that we are such poles apart that there's no point in continuing this discussion. I find your suggestion that DRM removal can in any way be equated to piracy to be utterly ludicrous.

And I find your suggestion that lending someone an e-reader with a book on it can in any way be equated to piracy to be utterly ludicrous. There is NO illegal copy being made in that case, since the person is reading the SAME COPY that I read. (so no copyright infringement, and, at least in the case of Amazon, not against the TOS, since the question has been asked and answered.) Now...this is in contrast to your case, where you are, in fact, making a copy of the book, in DIRECT VIOLATION of, at the very least, the TOS, and, since you are removing DRM to do so, I believe it is still in violation of the law.

Shari

[Catlady]

Originally Posted by HarryT

If you can see no moral difference between removing DRM and format shifting, to allow you to make free use of legally-bought books on different devices, and piracy, where you are taking it upon yourself to give copies of books to people who have no right whatsoever to have them, then I'm afraid that we are such poles apart that there's no point in continuing this discussion. I find your suggestion that DRM removal can in any way be equated to piracy to be utterly ludicrous.

I find your suggestion that making a copy for Aunt Mary to read and uploading a copy to a file-sharing site can be equated to be utterly ludicrous.

[ApK]

Originally Posted by Catlady

I find your suggestion that making a copy for Aunt Mary to read and uploading a copy to a file-sharing site can be equated to be utterly ludicrous.

I honestly cannot see how they are different.
One is giving someone an unauthorized copy, the other is giving someone an unauthorized copy. I see no meaningful difference in knowing the someone's name, or in the expected number of someones, other than when it comes time to calculate damages. Unless you think the likelihood of getting in trouble makes a difference? I don't.
What if you uploaded to the file sharing site and only Aunt Mary ever happened to download a copy? Now you did nothing wrong?

With Harry's cases I can see the difference clearly, starting with the fact that one is illegal and one is arguable at best, based on differing court opinions and ambiguous and untested language in the DMCA, and continuing on to one is clearly not a case of fair use, and the other seems to be, and finally getting down to the more arguably ambiguous moral concerns, which I personally see the same way Harry does.

[DiapDealer]

Originally Posted by ApK

I honestly cannot see how they are different.

Then you are being deliberately obtuse.

[ApK]

Originally Posted by DiapDealer

Then you are being deliberately obtuse.

I expanded on my reasoning since first posting, perhaps you can expand on your rebuttal?

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by shalym

And I find your suggestion that lending someone an e-reader with a book on it can in any way be equated to piracy to be utterly ludicrous.

Stop introducing red herrings into the discussion. We're not talking here about letting someone read a book on your reading device; we're talking about making copies of books and giving those copies to someone else. You know this perfectly well, since in your earlier post you said that you thought it was perfectly OK for someone to give you a book if you promised to delete it when you'd finished it.

[j.p.s]

Originally Posted by HarryT

It is piracy. It's not my opinion: it's an undeniable fact. That's what piracy is: the unauthorised reproduction of copyrighted material.

Format shifting absolutely poositively makes a copy. If the original is encrypted, the copying is unauthorized.