For reading free books

[Elfwreck]

Originally Posted by HarryT

I really have to disagee with the somewhat "melodramatic" assertion your signature makes that DRM is "evil". DRM is simply a marketing technique - it is neither "good" nor "evil", any more than the fact that, say, if I buy a lens for my Canon DSLR I cannot subsequently use it on a Nikon camera is "evil". Every manufacturer tries to lock you in to their products; it makes sound commercial sense to do so.

There are no laws that prevent you from making a device that allows your Nikon to use a Canon lens. There are no laws that prevent you from selling your Canon lens to someone who has a Canon, after you decide to switch to Nikon.

The "evil" in DRM is that it removes the purchaser's property rights, often without telling the purchaser that those rights have been curtailed.

[Patricia]

Here's a curious article from today's London Guardian, arguing that a LACK of piracy is the greatest danger to ebooks:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology...d-books-piracy

[Wollff]

As many have remarked already, the situation of the "ebook industry" and the "music industry" are quite similar in regard to the changes that the internet is forcing on them.

The greatest difference is that the ebook industry actually has a head start: It's made by people who are focused on the digital side of the issue from the beginning, while the record lables have been pretty much steamrollered by the sudden appearance of Napster&Co.
There are stores that legally sell the books you'd like to read, even before the ebook-wave has become mainstream. In case of Mp3s it took some years until it was possible to buy your songs at a reasonable price online. Up to that point, piracy roamed uncontested. Then people began to adapt (not the record lables, Apple had to shove them towards the solution...). In the case of ebooks, the transition to digital media will probably be a little smoother, simply because the awareness of the oncoming problems is present.
I'm not thinking that there is too little piracy to let ebooks rise. Ebooks will become mainstream, as the devices get cheaper and people start to notice that the displays really are as good as paper. It just will not be a sudden explosion, but a gradual ascent. And there will be piracy.

It seems to me, right now many people are beginning to accept piracy more as a fact that exists and always will, rather than as an evil that has to be rooted out no matter what (hello music industry). Which leads to the (painful) realization that, if piracy isn't inherently evil, one can use the picacy dominated channels (P2P) in order to do marketing (the free prerelease of albums etc.). The fact that this kind of thing works, leads to the second painful realization: The "pirates" are valuable customers and a great word of mouth-marketing tool. Which leads to two painful conclusions: First, you can't root them out. Jailing 1/10th of the internet users, which is a conservative estimate of the number of people who have copied something illegally, doesn't sound realistic. And second, the painful part, you don't even want to root them out. Do you want to jail your customers? Do you want to jail the people who advertise for you?
The final conclusion, though highly disturbing for me, seems clear: The concept of seeing piracy as stealing is dead.

In analogy to the "e-music industry", there probably will be no big problems for the ebook industry, regardless of DRM. Curtailed property rights and such, probably will, over short or long, just force vendors to lower the price on the DRM files a bit (or enable others to distribute non DRM titles at a higher price). It's not a very serious issue in my opinion.

Those, who will have to deal with serious changes, as in the music industry, are the publishers. Their role will have to change, with less focus lying on the printing press and distribution of the word. The internet does an superb job of such things all by itself. The weight will have to shift to the marketing side and, above all, quality control and support of the author.
The publishers will adapt. Simply because they have to. And talented artists won't starve. Because we all still want to read great books.

Whatever happens, it will be interesting to watch.

P.S: iREX DR1000 is best for viewing unprocessed PDFs in my opinion

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by Wollff

It seems to me, right now many people are beginning to accept piracy more as a fact that exists and always will, rather than as an evil that has to be rooted out no matter what (hello music industry).

I really must disagree with you. We can accept the (regretable) fact that there will always be criminals without drawing the conclusion "so let's not bother punishing them". I regard it as rather like the trade in illegal drugs - the "end users" (the downloaders) are the "small fry"; there's no point in bothering going after them. The people to seek out and punish with all the rigour of the law are the dealers - the uploaders; the criminals who make this stuff available on the internet in the first place. No uploaders = no downloaders.

Those, who will have to deal with serious changes, as in the music industry, are the publishers. Their role will have to change, with less focus lying on the printing press and distribution of the word.

Publishers these days very rarely print their own books - it's all contracted out. The primary job of a publisher is to convert the ungrammatical, poorly-written manuscript that the author churns out into something commercially saleable. That is, I think, a point often overlooked in the popular "we don't need publishers" argument one sees so often today. WRONG. Very few authors are capable of writing saleable books without the aid of a good editor, although many more THINK that they are. That role is equally necessary for eBooks.

[bigmoney]

Originally Posted by HarryT

Publishers these days very rarely print their own books - it's all contracted out. The primary job of a publisher is to convert the ungrammatical, poorly-written manuscript that the author churns out into something commercially saleable. That is, I think, a point often overlooked in the popular "we don't need publishers" argument one sees so often today. WRONG. Very few authors are capable of writing saleable books without the aid of a good editor, although many more THINK that they are. That role is equally necessary for eBooks.

In a world without traditional publishers, there will still exist the need of editors, proofreaders, revisors, etc, no doubt. Even if one day all the publishers disappear from the face of the planet, and consumers start buying books directly from the authors or in channels similar to iTunes, those authors that put out books with good writing, grammar etc will naturally have more success and be able to sell their work for a better price. So they might end up hiring editors and proofreaders themselves, instead of get the job done by their publishers, but the demand for quality will still exist so the job will still get done, somehow. So the middle man might be in trouble, but the ends (the author and the reader) should be fine, IMO.

PS: Welcome to the forums, Wollff, your first post was very good indeed

[tompe]

Originally Posted by Elfwreck

The "evil" in DRM is that it removes the purchaser's property rights, often without telling the purchaser that those rights have been curtailed.

I think that we might loose our culture also. If the DRM systems gets better how will researcher in 500 years be able to access our books?

I am usually some kind of utilitarianist so the bad thing with DRM is that it leads to a situation with less utility than what we would have without DRM.

[Wollff]

I regard it as rather like the trade in illegal drugs - the "end users" (the downloaders) are the "small fry"; there's no point in bothering going after them. The people to seek out and punish with all the rigour of the law are the dealers - the uploaders; the criminals who make this stuff available on the internet in the first place. No uploaders = no downloaders.

That is actually a really nice comparision. It helps to understand why the opinions regarding piracy are so vastly different.
Let me start this with the question of why there are some illegal drugs. The simple answer is that, were they legal, they probably would do quite a bit of harm to people and society. Suppose Heroin were legalized, many people would try it, get hooked, and at worst society would crumble (as it happened in China in the late 1800s to early 1900s with Opium).
On the other hand we have a whole lot of legal drugs, which are also neither beneficial to society nor to the individual. Tobacco and Alcohol probably are the most famous examples, both amassing a considerable death toll every year. So why are they not illegal? If all people became heavy drinkers and smokers, society wouldn't be able to function either. But most people can deal with those legal drugs. Consensus is, that one can be trusted to make reasonable use of those substances without having to forbid them.

Probably you see where I'm going: Some people see piracy as an illegal drug. It's a bad thing that must be banned, else everyone will start doing it excessively. As a result the artists will starve and that part of society will crumble. If there are so many people doing the bad stuff that you can't catch them all, you'll have to go up a level and target the dealers to stop the supply. If that doesn't help you'll have go up one more level and hit the people who grow the bad stuff, namely... the artists. I hope it's the analogy that fails here
The proponents of piracy see it as a potentially legal drug. Piracy may not be a good thing. It's really difficult to try and justify piracy as morally right, without busting up all concepts of intellectual property along the way. If everyone participated heavily in piracy, without buying anything, the artists would starve. But a reasonable person can be trusted to use it responsibly for his personal enjoyment, keeping the damage in a tolerable range.

When thinking along in this vein, I can't stop drawing the parallel to the 30's and its prohibition. Some people thought it wise to forbid the use of alcohol, because of its largely negative effects, without much positive recompenstaion. Outlawing alcohol would have been a good thing, had everybody stopped drinking because of that.
But people, first of all, were used to drinking already and most didn't see it as evil or harmful, because they were in control of their habit. As a result of outlawing alcohol, there emerged a whole new black market, dealers, distributors, shady drinking dens and quite a bit of other stuff that wasn't altogether pleasant.
I think the same applies for piracy today: Many people are used to it, most don't see it as evil or harmful and are in control of their habit. If they like something they probably still will buy the product in many cases. And because it's outlawed, there are dubious Russian servers around, that offer you access to shady things, with often adverse consequences for your computer. But at least you won't go blind, as from bad booze.

To be clear: I don't want to say, piracy is a good thing. Just that it is part of many people's lives about as much as the occassional drink or a cigarette. In stark contrast to a shot of heroin.

[mosteo]

I'd like to add another point to the interesting points raised by wollff and the others, and this is one of focusing on the thing that is less subject to opinion: It doesn't matter the legality of piracy. In the not so distant future, friend-to-friend encrypted networks (e.g. freenet) will become mainstream, unless outlawed. (However I don't think they can be effectively outlawed without fundamentally turning upside-down the whole internet, which admitedly is a scary possibility).

Well, the tabula rasa aspect of it is that piracy is here to stay, and that markets must better take this into account instead of dreaming of solutions that will not be enforceable for long. Nobody thought in the past of outlawing the recording of songs from FM radio, because it's pointless in its face. IMHO, f2f will have to be accepted as a new form of publicity. Yes, the main difference with broadcast radio is that it was controlled by the broadcaster.

This obviously leads to the big question of what can be done for goods that can be easily reproduced in the digital era. DRM has the obvious drawback of making the pirated good more attractive than the legit one, so in the end this may be a no-go. I honestly cannot point yet to a plausible solution, albeit I have read some interesting suggestions like sponsorship by the masses.

Some argue that rampant piracy will be untenable for the majority of authors. Some retort to this that this will cause only the vocational and gifted creators to survive (perhaps against very hard initial odds), and see it as a good thing.

My intention here is not to point to the right solution (which I don't know), but to remark that piracy, for some a very big evil and for some others something akin to private copy, is here to stay and must be "workarounded", just in case it can't be reduced to black market levels and becomes widespread (I guess in such case it would be no longer piracy but something else).

And while the piracy aspect seems extraordinarily clear cut as illegal for some people, let me tell a sad history: the Spanish equivalent of the RIAA, a non-profit private institution, has managed to make into law a levy on blank media in order to compensate for the private copy right: every CD, DVD, mp3 player or capable phone, multimedia hard disk or disk not preinstalled with O.S. in a new computer, has a portion [1] that goes to this private entity. There's no exception to this, there are simply no legal blank media without it nor ways to get an exemption (e.g. business that use these media for backup, or courts, that are mandated by law to record proceedings). Importing a single 50-stack DVD is cheaper after shipping costs due to this. An equivalent institution, CEDRO, also gets money for the book publishing sector from printers and photocopiers.

With this climate, you can't wonder that most Spanish youth considers p2p as a perfectly fine way of obtaining music et al. They feel they're being charged in advance, with a preemptive piracy tax (which it is not!). You won't convince them that p2p downloading is illegal or immoral, the feel they're being milked in advance by the industry. This leads to wollff point that, for some people, "piracy" is just not wrong.

[1] http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canon_p....ADa_del_canon

[dadioflex]

Edit.

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by mosteo

Well, the tabula rasa aspect of it is that piracy is here to stay, and that markets must better take this into account instead of dreaming of solutions that will not be enforceable for long. Nobody thought in the past of outlawing the recording of songs from FM radio, because it's pointless in its face.

You are wrong. Recording music from the radio is, and always has been, illegal in the UK.

My intention here is not to point to the right solution (which I don't know), but to remark that piracy, for some a very big evil and for some others something akin to private copy, is here to stay and must be "workarounded", just in case it can't be reduced to black market levels and becomes widespread (I guess in such case it would be no longer piracy but something else).

Thankfully, most people are honest, and will pay for the books they wish to read. There will always be a small percentage of dishonest people who want "something for nothing"

[mosteo]

Originally Posted by HarryT

You are wrong. Recording music from the radio is, and always has been, illegal in the UK.

I see, I'm wrong [for the UK case]. Well, this highlights that in "a global new world" we cannot take anything for granted. (People in Spain also is taken by surprise when they first learn about the tax on TV sets in UK).

I'd say this has been always legal in Spain, although IANAL (this [1] seems to confirm). I know that "private copy" (it's a well defined term in Spanish law) includes, at least, copies for personal use you make from broadcast media and media shifting.

Originally Posted by HarryT

Thankfully, most people are honest, and will pay for the books they wish to read. There will always be a small percentage of dishonest people who want "something for nothing"

Which directly leads to why the honest people has to suffer the DRM while the dishonest has not (And remember, I want to pay, but not under what I consider disadvantageous conditions. If I cave, I'm only going against my own long term interest.)

As someone has said before, they should start calling DRM media a rental (with according prices, one can dream ). This would feel more realistic to me. I see that people here that don't mind the DRM is because, as they say, their use pattern mimics that of rental: quick consumption and be done with it.

[1] http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derecho_de_copia_privada

[Sweetpea]

Originally Posted by HarryT

You are wrong. Recording music from the radio is, and always has been, illegal in the UK.

Are you allowed to record tv shows?

We are allowed to record music from the radio. We're even allowed to put it on multiple carriers. That's why we pay a certain percentage above the bare price for every possible carrier (cassette, CD, DVD, HD...) That percentage is meant for the artists.

[bigmoney]

Originally Posted by HarryT

You are wrong. Recording music from the radio is, and always has been, illegal in the UK.

Sounds like a good trivia question, even for the British
Seriously, do people actually know and care about such law? is it enforced?

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by Sweetpea

Are you allowed to record tv shows?

Only for the purpose of "time shifting" - ie watching it at a time that's convenient for you. Technically, we're not allowed to store it permanently (although nobody's ever been prosecuted for doing so, obviously!).

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by bigmoney

Sounds like a good trivia question, even for the British
Seriously, do people actually know and care about such law? is it enforced?

For personal use? No, of course not . However, you'd get into trouble if you tried selling music recorded from the radio, I imagine.