Stallman: EBooks are "attacking our freedom"

http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/367894/ebooks-are-attacking-our-freedom

by noarchy • 15 years ago

35 51 15 years ago

pcpro.co.uk

I heard Amazon might be allowing epub books from authors/publishers starting this fall, but I doubt they'll be converting all their existing ebooks to ePub, which is a shame.

And Stallman is right. You have fewer rights with ebooks than you do with real books.

noarchy3• 15 years ago

I agree with him on those points. Where I disagree is when he suggests that taxes should be used to pay authors. It is difficult to justify that in the name of "freedom", imo.

Natsu3• 15 years ago

It's also somewhat dangerous. I can't remember the details, but there are places where you, effectively, can't give away your own work for free because the government is trying to protect you.

esrauch2• 15 years ago

It seems like this identical argument was made when the first tax-paid public libraries were opened, and yet very few people seem to be anti-public library today.

davidw• 15 years ago

"Our tax dollars are paying for WHAT?!" would, IMO, slowly (or even quickly) erode the list of "approved" topics and authors. And of course gaming the system would be worth a significant amount of money.

Also: tax dollars are a per-country thing, whereas popularity is often global. It would make sense for countries to try and free-ride and get other countries' books for free and pay their authors nothing. For instance Australia could happily pay nothing to authors and let the US and UK pay them.

Natsu3• 15 years ago

The sad thing is that we put a stop to this (and came up with first sale rights) when they tried all this crap with real books.

Now that books are digital, I guess we need to do it again.

esrauch2• 15 years ago

I don't think that it is so simple; with physical books it is still illegal to make duplications, and with digital copies it is extremely difficult to allow people to transfer ownership of their copies without allowing for unlimited duplication and distribution that would destroy all motivation for anyone to purchase it to begin with.

Second hand sale and lending of physical books would have been outlawed if it destroyed the whole book sale economy. I always see comments on here and on reddit that imply that people are too dumb to realize that ebooks are analogous to physical books, but that is a seriously absurd claim since they are so trivially similar; the difference in their legal treatment is rational and pragmatic not an evil conspiracy by publishers.

jeffreymcmanus3• 15 years ago

But from "fewer rights" it's a pretty big semantic leap to "attacking our freedom". Unless you're some kind of absolutist, which I understand Stallman to be.

aw3c23• 15 years ago

I think the slow degrade of our freedom is meant. It is not an aggressive full-blown aggressive attack which we would probably oppose boldly, but a slowly creeping loss of rights and possibilities that people accept because "ah, I can live with THAT". It is hard to give a good title to that process so "attacking our freedom" sounds out of place.

RexRollman6• 15 years ago

DRM is the problem here, not eBooks. eBooks themselves have a lot of potential, especially when you consider they don't ware down or degrade, they take no physical space, and that you have the option of changing things such as font size.

And speaking as someone who has owned some of his books for decades, I worry about the long term implications of owning a collection of books encumbered with DRM.

scraplab2• 15 years ago

It's more than DRM though - there are no open ways of exporting annotations or bookmarks, on any of the major e-reading platforms. The Open Bookmarks project is an attempt to kick start this conversation, before it gets left behind.

http://www.openbookmarks.org/

bcaulf• 15 years ago

"You have fewer rights with ebooks than you do with real books." You may have fewer legal rights but you have more options and control, as long as the ebooks are pirated! Pirated books can be obtained anonymously, copied freely, and they cannot be revoked. Just as with software and DVDs, the pirated version is actually better than the for-pay version.

StavrosK2• 15 years ago

"ebooks" aren't "attacking our freedom". DRM and proprietary formats are.

I'm publishing my Python tutorial on leanpub (a great idea which I plug whenever I can) and it's DRM free and available on many formats:

http://leanpub.com/learn-python/

You just buy the book once and you can download as many of the formats as you want, whenever you want, and if I update the book you get all subsequent versions for free. You can back it up and share it with your friends (maybe that's illegal, but you have my permission to do it with my book), etc.

dfxm12• 15 years ago

Can you resell it to a friend when you have no more use for it and they need it?

samlevine• 15 years ago

Can you resell life insurance when you have no more use for it and they need it?

orofino• 15 years ago

If you want to resell it, then forgo the benefit of being able to carry hundred or thousands of books around in a tiny device and buy the dead trees. Large industries won't just change overnight, we saw that Apple needed to gain a foothold before they could remove the DRM form their music.

These changes need to be evolutionary, publishers need to be persuaded (or forced) to make this change, no one has the leverage for that today. I hate DRM as much as the next guy, but this is a stepping stone, it isn't "attackin" anything.

If your issue is with all digital distribution, I'm not sure I can help you.

edit: typo

StavrosK2• 15 years ago

That's up to the author, but if you promise to delete it from all your devices, it's fine with me.

rmc2• 15 years ago

I was pleasantly suprised to find that, for the Kindle Direct Publishing platform, DRM is optional. That's right. You don't need DRM to sell ebooks on the Kindle Shop.

RexRollman6• 15 years ago

That makes me wonder why they use it on the free, public domain books that Amazon snarfed from Project Gutenburg.

aw3c23• 15 years ago

Can you link to examples? Random guess would be that they are not sold by Amazon directly but by third-party merchants on Amazon.

mvalle• 15 years ago

I suspect this might be the work of Cory Docterow, I believe I heard him mentioning that the did a deal with Amazon where they would publish his books without DRM. But I might be wrong.

rmc2• 15 years ago

I suspect another reason is that many self published authors want to use Creative Commons licenced works for book covers, and (depending on the licence) you would not be able to use DRM on a CC book.

jeffreymcmanus3• 15 years ago

The potential for ebooks to increase the distribution and reduce the cost of books, thereby increasing our freedom, never seems to be factored into this discussion. I wonder why?

jackowayed• 15 years ago

How does more utility == more freedom?

I can lend physical books to friends, I can sell them when I'm done with them, I can buy them cheap from others who are done with them. That's freedom. And that's what the books I have the opportunity to buy on my Kindle lack (ability to lend some Kindle books in a lame way aside).

No matter how many more books I have on the Kindle because ebooks are cheaper, the only freedom I have with them are to read them on devices that Amazon decides to support and to lend my whole Kindle to someone to let them read something.

jeffreymcmanus3• 15 years ago

You're missing my point, which is that more books and cheaper books equals more freedom.

I'm not arguing against the notion that you should be able to do what you want with something you've purchased. But every business model ever conceived limits freedom in some way, and the echo-chamber argument that's put forth here consistently fails to take into account the fact that ebooks (and the business models that accompany them) have the potential to increase freedom by promoting reading.

At the end of the day, nobody's preventing you from buying a paper book; if you want to lend the book out, buy the paper version. Simple.

NumberFiveAlive• 15 years ago

Lending on the Kindle has worked pretty well for me. Can you clarify why it's lame?

Also, can you name a device that Amazon doesn't support, apart from the Nook? I frequently read my Kindle content on the Kindle itself, my two PCs and my Mac, and my Droidx. I could also do it on any tablet (if I owned one), or my wife's iPhone.

Not to mention, you can read any non-DRM content you want on the Kindle.

And it's not that more utility == more freedom. It's that easier-to-self-publish is going to lower the barrier for people to create niche content by bypassing the big publishing houses. It's also going to create lower priced books overall, as well as more and better free content.

I also personally think it's only a matter of time before the publishers realize what the music industry has mostly realized after a decade: DRM doesn't work. I think it will slowly phase itself out. Just a guess, though, YMMV.

tzs• 15 years ago

Buy a physical book. Read it. Sell it. Net result is you had the book for a short while, effectively got a discount on it (because you sold it), and if you change your mind and want to read it again you'll have to go buy it again.

Compare to buying that book on Kindle. If the savings are more than what your net cost is in the physical case, you come out ahead, because on the Kindle side you don't actually get rid of the book. At most you stop syncing it to the device. If you later decide you want to read it again, you don't have to go out and buy another copy.

Even for books that you would not sell, Kindle can be a win on freedom simply by being cheaper. I'm free to read more books if I'm spending less per book. It then becomes a matter of weighing the options. Go with physical books, and I don't have to worry that maybe some legal snafu will result in my books ceasing to function. Go with Kindle, and read more books for the same money.

What Stallman overlooks in most of his arguments is that many of us are adults. We are capable of considering the alternatives and deciding which of the competing freedoms are most important to us.

RexRollman6• 15 years ago

You have less freedom because you can no longer do with it as you will; you can only do what they let you. And I've never heard of anyone losing access to a real book just because the publisher went out of business and closed down their DRM authentication servers.

dpapathanasiou• 15 years ago

The DRM used on ebooks is pretty weak and easily removed.

So in practice, there's no real difference.

The trouble is that doing so is a violation of the DMCA, which can result in criminal charges.

So the simple act of keeping a DRM-free copy (to prevent Amazon from yanking it off your Kindle), or lending it to a friend, etc. opens up all kinds of potential problems in theory.

Steko• 15 years ago

Ironically one of our best bets for efreedoms is from the efforts of authoritarian countries looking to protect local industries from US content behemoths.

siphr• 15 years ago

I have to disagree with RMS here. As an example of ebooks attacking our freedom, I agree with someone else that the problem is DRM and not the ebooks. Amazon, for example, lets the publisher choose whether they would like DRM in their ebooks or not. More so, the publishing platform lets the publisher to allow lending. The issue of Amazon wiping out 1984 is one of those things that has been done to death as a news article on the internet. Sure it was wrong, but from the copyright holder's point of view, it may be justified.

teyc• 15 years ago

I'd love to see Stallman and Andrea Dworkin on stage together.

thisrod• 15 years ago

Here is Stallman's proposal, in his own words:

http://stallman.org/articles/internet-sharing-license.en.htm...

Australia, Canada, the US and the UK spend lots of public money on books, paintings, plays, concerts and broadcasts. Stallman wants to abstract over media, and pay according to law instead of ministerial taste. That makes sense to me.

Remember that copying is only an issue if you publish. You can charge whatever you want for the privilege of seeing your unpublished work. If you'd lose money by publishing it, don't.

Stallman: EBooks are "attacking our freedom"

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