EFF blog’s take on the Kindle: Yes, beware of the DRM and related issues
So what else would you expect from EFF? Well, for one thing, I’d welcome EFF taking an interest in ePub development and encouraging a good mix of players so that no one company can dominate.
EFF’s advocacy of social DRM as an alternative to the usual kind—a compromise, even though the best "protection" is none—would also help. No, we’re not talking about encryption here.
Social DRM is hardly without flaws, but would still be a nice, gentle way of reminding the users of both their rights and the creators’. I can even see social DRM systems set up to allow buying and selling of e-books in keeping with the first sale doctrine.
Related: Social DRM, Watermarking and Ex-Libris.
Technorati Tags: Electronic Frontier Foundation,EFF
August 19th, 2008 at 9:18 am
Alas, the EFF blog doesn’t have a comment section. Oh well.
The EFF blog writes:
I see a lot of “consumer advocates” like the EFF beating the “first sale” gong. I’d just love to know how that’s supposed to work. Since transferring a file creates a copy—the bits don’t magically up and migrate across—then you’d have to trust the seller to delete his copy afterward. And given that many ebook services allow the buyer to redownload the book as many times as he wants, you’d have to have the seller’s cooperation in that, too. Every seller, no matter how large or small.
About the only way I could see it being managed is with some form of DRM wrapper that automagically transfers ownership rights at the server level and deletes no-longer-owned copies at the user level. But not only does DRM not even work as it is now, the trouble and expense of every ebook vendor everywhere implementing it just for the sake of virtuously preserving first sale rights would send prices right up for something that would just get cracked anyway. And also, the EFF blog doesn’t like DRM either.
The question of libraries loaning out books has the same problem.
To be fair, the blog seems to recognize these issues, as it asks the question of what happens to these rights when “sharing” or “lending” creates a perfect copy. But instead of talking about potential solutions, it just falls back on the dogma of “users should not have to give up rights” without making any suggestions as to how those rights should be implemented.
Thanks, guys, that’s really useful.
You just can’t have it all with ebooks, because they just don’t work like books and other works of IP that are tied to physical media. You can either accept and embrace the digital nature of the works and realize you are foregoing certain rights in so doing, or you can try to make them more like physical media by slapping on heavy DRM (which won’t work for very long anyway). You can’t have your cake and eat it too, and the sooner these digital rights advocates like the EFF stop this meaningless blather about all rights all the time and start working toward some kind of a compromise we can all live with, the better off we will all be.