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Old 04-10-2010, 12:29 PM   #31
Kali Yuga
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Originally Posted by rleguillow View Post
So why then am I totally unable to read the 100+ ebooks I bought for my first ereader?
I have a stack of Atari 800 games on cassette tapes gathering dust in a basement. Why can't I play them on my Mac with OS 10.6? Plus I've got all those Leading Edge Word Processing documents on 5.25" floppies.

It's unfortunate that you got spiked on the bleeding edge of a technology, but that can occur for any number of reasons. And further unfortunately, you are in a tiny percentage of people with this specific issue; i.e. if there are 10,000 or even 100,000 people who purchased unreadable and/or unconvertible .RB files, and 30 million iPhone owners who can purchase ebooks from over a dozen vendors, that puts you in the minority. Since the ebook market is much larger now, and is about to explode in popularity into an environment where your ebooks are not locked to a specific hardware device, and where vendors like Sony are moving towards standards like ePub, you have my sympathies but not my agreement with your characterization of the current environment.

By the way, in theory Rocketbook may try to make a comeback. Take up DRM-removal or multi-platform support with whatever organization is trying to revive the name.
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Old 04-10-2010, 04:02 PM   #32
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Originally Posted by Kali Yuga View Post
Again, these vendors are supporting a variety of devices: smartphones, PCs, readers. You have a lot more options than with console games or DRMed movies, or iTunes DRM'ed music at its start, for example.
Ahh... In other words, "Don't complain about the size of your prison cell. It's 700 sq ft. Other prisoners get only 200 sq ft."
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Old 04-10-2010, 08:44 PM   #33
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Ahh... In other words, "Don't complain about the size of your prison cell. It's 700 sq ft. Other prisoners get only 200 sq ft."
Well, I am often tempted to tell people that they are whiney little kvetches who need to man up. But no, that's not my point here, and I can see why people have issues with vendor lock-ins. The point is that DRM is not used all that often as a hardware lock-in, particularly for ebooks.

E.g. PC games and applications often have DRM; however, the developer could care less if you run it on an HP, a Dell, a home-built computer, or a virtual machine running on a Mac or Linux host (though they will care if you run it on too many computers at once). Microsoft used DRM for its PlaysForSure content, which was not locked to a specific hardware device, as it was designed to play on multiple devices. DVD's use DRM and copy protection, not to lock you into a specific vendor but to protect content. Google's upcoming book project will use DRM, and will run on any device with a web browser. There is no reason why you can't take your iPhone app and publish an identical app for Android, Blackberry or other handheld platforms.

Apple seems to be one of the bigger offenders in this department -- e.g. initially iTunes audio tracks only worked on Apple hardware, for example -- but DRM is just a small part of that tendency. They use a multitude of techniques to control their platforms, with both positive and negative consequences. Even so, they switched their music sales to DRM-free not too long ago.

In contrast, Amazon -- whom I'm sure many people here would blast as "using DRM as a vendor lock-in method" -- sells DRM-free music, video files with DRM but does not offer a hardware device to lock it to, leaves it up to the content provider of DTP content to decide whether or not to apply DRM, and provides methods for reading their DRM-protected ebook content on a variety of hardware devices. Amazon could kill the Kindle reader today, and could still sell Kindle ebooks on a wide variety of devices, and Amazon's strategy from the start was for both the device and ebooks to separately produce profits. And of course, absolutely nothing stops you from loading up a Kindle app, a B&N app, Stanza, and a dozen other ebook apps on your PC, Mac or an increasing variety of smartphones.

How, exactly, does the above reveal a diabolical design by Amazon to lock their customers into a specific hardware platform via DRM?

Paper books also "bake in" their own restrictions. E.g. you can't make an unlimited number of duplicates with near-zero cost and perfect fidelity; you can't restore your paper copy from a backup; you can't simultaneously read your one copy of the paper book on 6 different devices at once. And of course, the usual copyright-related restrictions apply unless the book is in the public domain. So do these restrictions define a "prison" whose "cell size" is merely a little bit larger than what you get with a DRM'ed ebook...?

Last edited by Kali Yuga; 04-10-2010 at 08:46 PM.
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Old 04-10-2010, 08:48 PM   #34
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Simple test - can you utilise your legal rights, including those under fair use and first sale/exhaustion of rights.

Paper books - yes.
Non-DRM'ed eBook - yes.
DRM'ed eBook - no.

Black and white.
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Old 04-11-2010, 10:11 AM   #35
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I don't see DRM going away anytime soon because it is a different sort of animal than in the past. There was never a Universal DVD player made to play DVDs released by Universal and restricted to playing on the Universal VD player. One of the principal objectives of the current DRM for e-books is to restrict the e-book use to the e-book viewers made by the company selling the e-book. I believe the only reason Amazon, Sony, and Barnes & Noble (to cite the principal players) have any interest in e-books at all is to promote sales of their e-book devices.

That is why I am so down on the whole e-book pirating. If people could be trusted to just pay for the content that they are getting this justification [preventing pirating] for DRM would vanish. Authors would lose any incentive for supporting DRM and actually have an incentive to oppose a DRM scheme that hampers sale of their books through restriction to only certain e-reader devices.

So DRM is not going away soon which leaves me the e-book consumer with limited choices for books not in the public domain. Public domain books can be had without DRM several places, including here. In fact from this site I have already replaced the 100 'free' titles that came with the Sony PRS-505, my first e-reader purchase. It freed me from the ever so slight twinge of guilt for stripping the DRM from those books and in all cases provided better versions anyway. When not in the public domain my options in order of preference are: buy the e-book from Sony if available, buy it from another source and do what is necessary to make it readable on my Sony Daily Edition, or all to often discover that the book is not available as an e-book.

I consider it a real paradox in current law, in the U.S. At least, that I am committing a greater crime in buying an e-book form Amazon and removing the DRM to allow conversion to an EPUB viewable on my reader than I would be going to the 'darknet' and downloading a free copy; and action that deprives the book author and book publisher of their rightful income.

“if the law supposes that then the law is an ass.”
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Old 04-11-2010, 11:46 AM   #36
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Originally Posted by Hamlet53 View Post
That is why I am so down on the whole e-book pirating. If people could be trusted to just pay for the content that they are getting this justification [preventing pirating] for DRM would vanish.
I doubt it.

You properly described the characteristics of DRM protected ebooks in your post: they are goods unlike anything that we have seen so far. They are tied to one particular device (hence cumbersome to share even with someone from your household), they are time constrained (that device will eventually go to garbage dump), the "ownership" of copy is not tied to permanent information carrier like paper, no second-hand sales...

IMHO, the prevention of piracy is very low on the list of reasons for existence of encryption. And if it goes through, if the market swallows that new and transformed type of goods where everybody pays for the encrypted content, DRM will stay with us forever.

No, it is only the lack of success, if sales are affected by the publisher's insistence on DRM, that can force publishers to give up on encryption.

Last edited by Ankh; 04-11-2010 at 11:48 AM.
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Old 04-11-2010, 12:15 PM   #37
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The point is that DRM is not used all that often as a hardware lock-in, particularly for ebooks.
And my point still is that Hardware lock in is like a 200 sq ft prison cell.
Vendor lock in is like a 700 sq ft cell.

Yes, vendor lock in is better, but it's still a prison cell.

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Originally Posted by Kali Yuga View Post
Microsoft used DRM for its PlaysForSure content, which was not locked to a specific hardware device,
Laugh! PlaysForSure content sure didn't play on a Zune. Talk to the many, many people who purchased PlaysForSure "secured" content and then bought a Zune, only to find that the Zune wouldn't play the content that they "bought".

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Originally Posted by Kali Yuga View Post
Apple seems to be one of the bigger offenders in this department -- e.g. initially iTunes audio tracks only worked on Apple hardware, for example -- but DRM is just a small part of that tendency. They use a multitude of techniques to control their platforms, with both positive and negative consequences. Even so, they switched their music sales to DRM-free not too long ago.
But iTunes will only work with closed platforms and iTunes is the only program that will (reliably) sync your music with an iPod. Apple updates to iPods keep breaking the 3rd party programs.

Hmmm... Still smells like vendor lock in to me.

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Originally Posted by Kali Yuga View Post
In contrast, Amazon -- whom I'm sure many people here would blast as "using DRM as a vendor lock-in method" -- sells DRM-free music, video files
The topic here is eBooks. The Music industry already (grudgingly) accepted the truth of the market.

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How, exactly, does the above reveal a diabolical design by Amazon to lock their customers into a specific hardware platform via DRM?
Ever hear of the Kindle? Ever hear of Amazon eBook DRM?

How many non-Amazon devices can read an Amazon DRMed eBook?

Why did Amazon make their Mobipocket format different from the one that had been in use for years?

In order for DRM to do anything reasonably useful, the reading device must remain outside the customer's control. It must remain closed. Once the device opens up, the secret that the DRM uses to keep content "secure" is out and the DRM becomes a useless expense.

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Paper books also "bake in" their own restrictions.
Yes, yes, yes. But all those restrictions are because the book is physical. Again, the topic is eBooks, not pBooks.
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