Are Fair Use Rights coming to an end?

[Ron.]

Originally Posted by speedlever

I wonder what the difference is? I'm running Win7/64 and K4PC 1.6 and do not have that issue.

Both of my Laptops run Win7, all Kindle support could tell me was to "make sure your internet connection is working" Since I was none to fond of how 1.6 displays all books downloaded and archived by default I just downgraded and didn't worry about it.

[lestatar]

Originally Posted by poohbear_nc

This announcement of beefing up Kindle ebooks DRM strength seems to me to tie in with the announcement of Amazon "renting" textbooks. To get publishers on board, Amazon has to be able to convince the publishers that students won't be able to rent one copy, strip the DRM & expiration mechanism, and then share one copy among an entire class. Or strip the DRM and start an "used" ebook market similar to that of pbooks. For this plan, Amazon would need to develop DRM strong enough or hidden enough to withstand cracking (remember how long it took to crack Topaz?) or to have DRM whose mechanism could be changed without warning (like the new releases of K4PC).
I see this as a serious move to establish a secure ebook textbook market. Just contemplate what students now pay for pbook textbooks.

This makes complete sense to me. Would not be surprised one bit if this indeed is the case.

I still look back with horror just thinking about what I spent on textbooks during college.

[carld]

Originally Posted by DianNC

BTW...something I've been curious about is the library books for Kindle users. What format will they be in? Are they available yet? Anyone know?

I expect that they'll be in Amazon's azw format, but no one knows for sure. It's possible that they'll be ePubs with Amazon's DRM attached, but I think that's less likely. It's remotely possible that Amazon will simply support ePub's with Adobe's DRM, but I find that highly improbable.

The books won't be available until sometime later this year. And no one has released any concrete details that I'm aware of.

[carpetmojo]

Originally Posted by carld

The books won't be available until sometime later this year. And no one has released any concrete details that I'm aware of.

That won't stop someone coming up with the definitive conspiratorialistic solution here, I bet.....................

[Pinecone]

The thing is, if Amazon does make an unbreakable or at least so difficult it isn't done DRM. They will LOSE customers. I hae a Sony, without being able to strip DRM and convert from Mobi to ePub, their books are worthless to me.

And no, I will NOT buy a Kindle. Lose, lose for Amazon.

[DianNC]

Originally Posted by carld

I expect that they'll be in Amazon's azw format, but no one knows for sure. It's possible that they'll be ePubs with Amazon's DRM attached, but I think that's less likely. It's remotely possible that Amazon will simply support ePub's with Adobe's DRM, but I find that highly improbable.

The books won't be available until sometime later this year. And no one has released any concrete details that I'm aware of.

Reading the blurbs from Overdrive, it almost sounds like they're trying to come up with a single (universal?) format for library users, though -- one that will work on all ereaders, all operating systems, all 'devices'.

Right now, my local libraries only partner with Overdrive for audiobooks (.mp3 and .wma) and use ADE for ebooks, using the formats of epub, mobipocket and PDF (mostly epub now).

[linux_author]

when you purchase a DRM'd device or piece of intellectual property, you agree to the handcuffs of the design and the philosophy - if so, that's fine...

fortunately, there are open alternatives, and 'free as in not free beer' choices in the world - and always will be... i am more than willing to suffer loss of functionality and feature to be able to use hardware and software free of encumbrance...

just as RIAA was behind the eight-ball (something i told David Segal when he was at the Washington Post many years ago) on the .mp3 format, 'middlemen' such as Amazon will learn - to great disappointment - that software, ideas, and the published word cannot and will never be 'locked up' to exclusive use...

[fbrII]

'middlemen' such as Amazon will learn - to great disappointment - that software, ideas, and the published word cannot and will never be 'locked up' to exclusive use...

I agree entirely with your sentiments but why limit blame to the 'middlemen'? I don't think DRM was initiated for the protection of the 'middlemen'.

Both Charles Dickens and Anthony Trollope complained openly about the ethics of American Publishing houses who frequently published works by European without paying them anything in royalties. Trollope referred to American publishers as 'pirates' in his autobiography, harsh words indeed. My guess is publishing houses feel the need to use DRM in order to protect themselves from customers who share their same ethics.

But then - its just a guess

[Elfwreck]

Originally Posted by fbrII

Both Charles Dickens and Anthony Trollope complained openly about the ethics of American Publishing houses who frequently published works by European without paying them anything in royalties. Trollope referred to American publishers as 'pirates' in his autobiography, harsh words indeed. My guess is publishing houses feel the need to use DRM in order to protect themselves from customers who share their same ethics.

There's a big difference between protecting your investments and business content from competitors, and "protecting" it from customers. One of my favorite quotes from Lessig's book, The Public Domain:

Imagine someone walking up to you in 1950, handing you a book or a record or a movie reel, and saying “Quick! Do something the law of intellectual property might forbid.” (This, I admit, is a scenario only likely to come to the mind of a person in my line of work.) You would have been hard-pressed to do so. Perhaps you could find a balky mimeograph machine, or press a reel-to-reel tape recorder into use. You might manage a single unauthorized showing of the movie—though to how many people? But triggering the law of intellectual property would be genuinely difficult. Like an antitank mine, it would not be triggered by the footsteps of individuals. It was reserved for bigger game.

Copyright law was never designed to go after individuals, and trying to apply it that way is creating both a chilling effect on creativity and a growing underground that perceives no difference between "Scan a chapter of an out-of-print textbook to email to a friend for research" and "place entire scanned PDFs of new textbooks on BigFileShare.com* for anyone to download"--because the publishers are screaming that those are the same kind of violation.

By not acknowledging the difference between casual sharing (a desirable thing, possibly the foundation of literary culture) and rampant unauthorized distribution, publishers convince a growing number of people that they are clueless about how books are normally used. Worse, by not spending resources prosecuting *actual for-profit violations*--like Amazon's unauthorized sales of 1984, caused by it not paying attention to its own cross-site settings--they convince the public that large publishing & distribution companies are in collusion *against* the people who pay them for content.

This is not a recipe for long-term financial success, in the era of instant global communication and easy data duplication. Attempting to create enforcement laws that evade prosecution requirements, and clickthrough agreements instead of actual license contracts, is not going to create a world in which content is only used they way they'd like it to be used.

*fictitious site name. Find your own file sharing sites. People who can't operate a Google search don't deserve pirated ebooks.**

**Which is not to say that other people do, just that if there are people who "deserve" pirated ebooks, they're not found among those who can't figure out the names of filesharing sites.

[Greg Anos]

Originally Posted by Elfwreck

There's a big difference between protecting your investments and business content from competitors, and "protecting" it from customers. One of my favorite quotes from Lessig's book, The Public Domain:


Copyright law was never designed to go after individuals, and trying to apply it that way is creating both a chilling effect on creativity and a growing underground that perceives no difference between "Scan a chapter of an out-of-print textbook to email to a friend for research" and "place entire scanned PDFs of new textbooks on BigFileShare.com* for anyone to download"--because the publishers are screaming that those are the same kind of violation.

By not acknowledging the difference between casual sharing (a desirable thing, possibly the foundation of literary culture) and rampant unauthorized distribution, publishers convince a growing number of people that they are clueless about how books are normally used. Worse, by not spending resources prosecuting *actual for-profit violations*--like Amazon's unauthorized sales of 1984, caused by it not paying attention to its own cross-site settings--they convince the public that large publishing & distribution companies are in collusion *against* the people who pay them for content.

This is not a recipe for long-term financial success, in the era of instant global communication and easy data duplication. Attempting to create enforcement laws that evade prosecution requirements, and clickthrough agreements instead of actual license contracts, is not going to create a world in which content is only used they way they'd like it to be used.

*fictitious site name. Find your own file sharing sites. People who can't operate a Google search don't deserve pirated ebooks.**

**Which is not to say that other people do, just that if there are people who "deserve" pirated ebooks, they're not found among those who can't figure out the names of filesharing sites.

Quite right, Elfwreck. What is so often left unsaid is these discussions, it that copyright was a creation of technology, and technology is killing it.

It didn't exist before the printing press (the first industrial revolution technology) created the ability to make lots of cheap copies.

It wont exist after everybody can make near-free copies of any information.

(With time lags on both ends....)

[Andrew H.]

Originally Posted by linux_author

'middlemen' such as Amazon will learn - to great disappointment - that software, ideas, and the published word cannot and will never be 'locked up' to exclusive use...

*Amazon* doesn't want DRM on books anymore than Apple wanted DRM on iTunes music. DRM offers no benefit to Amazon - it just makes things more complicated for Amazon and for the customers. Amazon will happily sell you non-DRM'd books today, in fact, if that is permitted by the copyright holders.

[Elfwreck]

Originally Posted by Andrew H.

*Amazon* doesn't want DRM on books anymore than Apple wanted DRM on iTunes music. DRM offers no benefit to Amazon - it just makes things more complicated for Amazon and for the customers. Amazon will happily sell you non-DRM'd books today, in fact, if that is permitted by the copyright holders.

For a long time, Amazon insisted on applying DRM even for those publishers who didn't want it. A number of small publishers mentioned this a couple of years ago. Presumably, Amazon's claim was that the big publishers required it and it was too much hassle to provide different options for each publisher.

I'm not sure if that's been changed even now--self-publishing allows you to set or not-set DRM; publishers have contracts that may have different terms. I haven't heard recently if Amazon's publishing contracts have changed to allow publishers, not individuals, to offer non-DRM'd ebooks.

DRM offers *incredible* benefit to Amazon--uncracked Kindle books can only be read on Amazon's software, and not on the ereaders designed by their competitors. You can't read DRM'd ebooks from other sites on the Kindle, which means Kindle owners (who don't strip DRM) have to do their buying of bestsellers from Amazon, not the competition. DRM does a lot more to force customer lock-in than prevent piracy.

[speedlever]

Originally Posted by Elfwreck

snip
DRM does a lot more to force customer lock-in than prevent piracy.

Paragraph 4 from the OP:
"The truth is that DRM is actually about enabling vendor lock-in. Forcing you to stay with the vendor given your large investment in ebooks so that they can enforce a license agreement to “rent” you the book at prices far above “rental” prices and approaching or surpassing full paper book prices. Vendors like Amazon want to take away your “fair use” rights. They do not want you to be able to archive the book as html (so it never gets lost) and they do not want you to convert it to your favourite reader format."

[jbjb]

Originally Posted by Ron.

Both of my Laptops run Win7, all Kindle support could tell me was to "make sure your internet connection is working" Since I was none to fond of how 1.6 displays all books downloaded and archived by default I just downgraded and didn't worry about it.

I've just been called back by Amazon's Kindle support (full marks for their service in this case!) and been told that it's been identified as a bug in Kindle for Mac 1.6 (and presumably the PC version too), and a patch has been / will be released to fix it.

Personally I'm sticking with 1.5.1 or the time being ....

/JB

[speedlever]

Interesting that the bug doesn't affect all PCs in the same way.