If someone decides to ruin us by selling thousands of copies of the book we sold him, we’ll buy one of those copies, see who he is, and ruin him back. If someone makes illicit copies for all his friends and relations, we won’t notice, but equally we won’t lose much. A fingerprinted e-book can be read on any e-book reader in the world, and always will be readable on them.
So let’s mark each e-book with its buyer’s fingerprint and tell the buyer to act fairly and reasonably. We all know what the reasonable use of a book is, even if we can’t necessarily formulate rules that capture its essence.
Social DRM is the obvious, humane alternative. Word of all, for both reader and publisher, DRMed books suffer from bitrot and in a decade from now most of them will be unreadable. He sees important word-of-mouth amplifiers such as lending banned, and the giving of his e-books as gifts made virtually impossible. Classic DRM is equally bad for the publisher because he has to buy in (literally) to one DRM platform or another and be tied to a specific distributor who can provide support for it. It ties the reader to particular reading devices and software and imposes unreasonable restrictions - on lending or giving away e-books - simply because the technology can’t regulate these activities and so must ban them. As publishers, we want our readers to be as free as possible to do what they want with the books we sell them, as long as we don’t get robbed.Ĭlassic DRM doesn’t do this.
0 kommentar(er)
