Episode 11 – DRM
DRM: Digital Rights Management
Special guest: original Ninja, Derek Kurth
Doctorow’s First Law: “Any time someone puts a lock on something that belongs to you, and won’t give you a key, they’re not doing it for your benefit.”
Kindle DRM:
- encryption key based
- same as the old mobipocket
ePub DRM:
- Adobe
- B&N (Adobe modified)
- Apple’s Fairplay
PDF DRM:
- ADEPT
- Password
LIT:
- Everyone’s favorite DRM format
Does DRM work?
- What’s it supposed to do?
- What does Steve Jobs think?
http://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughtsonmusic/
In 2007 90% of music sales is cd based which is non-drm system - Most pirates are actually customers
http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/511995 - Torrent Freak study of pirated eBooks after the iPad launch:
http://torrentfreak.com/ebook-piracy-surges-after-ipad-launch-100409/
Of the 10 best selling eBooks on Amazon, not a single one was available on a public BitTorrent feed. Of the 10 best selling paperback books in the business category, 6 were available on a BitTorrent feed. Based on these books, unauthorized eBook downloads on BitTorrent grew by 78% on average, but the total number of downloads was 435 per day for the most-downloaded title and 82 for the least. - Pirates gonna pirate, haters gonna hate
Harry Potter books
DRM hurts the experience for legal customers; once it’s cracked, it has no effect on illegal users. - Piracy may not be as rampant as the music and movie industries would have us believe
GAO report “Intellectual Property: Observations on Efforts to Quantify the Economic Effects of Counterfeit and Pirated Goods”, GAO-10-43 http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d10423.pdf
according to the GAO, the data used to quantify piracy isn’t reliable
There is no single methodology to collect and analyze data that can be applied across industries to estimate the effects of counterfeiting and piracy on the U.S. economy or industry sectors.
industry studies assume a 1:1 loss, which simply isn’t the case
Link to an article with more info: http://news.cnet.com/8301-31001_3-20002348-261.html - O’Reilly removed DRM, saw 104% increase in eBook sales (caveat: eBook sales were alsoincreasing for other reasons)
- Consumers hate it
http://www.teleread.com/drm/if-it-were-my-money-there%E2%80%99s-no-way-i%E2%80%99d-put-up-with-this-crp-says-young-reader/ - Do publishers need DRM?
Maybe for educational, refernce books
Is it legal to break DRM? (caveat: we are NOT lawyers)
- An Appeals court case says that breaking DRM is legal for fair use purposes.
- http://www.teleread.com/2010/07/25/appeals-court-case-could-legalize-breaking-drm-for-fair-use
- http://www.crunchgear.com/2010/07/26/now-legal-in-the-u-s-jailbreaking-your-iphone-ripping-a-dvd-for-educational-purposes/
- http://www.copyright.gov/1201/2010/Librarian-of-Congress-1201-Statement.html
- http://www.copylaw.org/2010/09/copyright-alert-is-big-publishings.html
Next week, the index and in-book linking.
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Tags: derek, DRM, ebook, ebooks, Harry Potter