Technological Restrictions on E-Books and Culture Wars on Books in 2022

Despite the long title, this post will be fairly short. This blog used to publish a lot more often (I had a lot more free time in high school & college) and focus a lot more on issues related to free software, free culture, and things like that, yet even after looking through posts on this blog from its early years (which, aligning with the stereotype of an adult looking through essays written in high school, made me cringe at the quality of writing even if I agreed with some of the basic opinions), I actually couldn't find any posts specifically about the effects of so-called digital rights management (DRM) on E-books.

In any case, I was motivated to write this because I recently listened to an episode [LINK] of a podcast associated with The Daily Show in which the guests discussed recent instances of conservative politicians in the US preventing public schools & libraries from teaching or carrying books that offend those politicians' cultural sensibilities. I distinctly remember reading in high school & college about warnings of the consequences of putting DRM on E-books, including making it easier to ban such books. At that time, I and many others felt it would be ridiculous for politically motivated book bans to take effect in the US especially given respect for the First Amendment to the US Constitution. Leaving aside whether such book bans from public schools & libraries technically violate that amendment if such bans don't go beyond those domains, it is disheartening to see a direct example of censorship so closely connected to technological restrictions that are politically motivated (not due to fundamental technical limitations). It will be interesting to see whether authors of banned books encourage or tolerate people scanning & sharing unauthorized PDF files of the books for free; this wouldn't be unprecedented, given that the huge markup of textbooks in the US compared to other countries has led many textbook authors to encourage students to buy cheaper editions from other countries.

A Victory for Software Innovation

A new article (Paul Matthews, New Zealand Computer Society) reports that the latest version of New Zealand's new patent bill has once again excluded software from patentability.
This is a great move in itself, but what's even more significant is that the people leading the charge against software patents are actually the 2 largest software companies in New Zealand. This means that the companies (and not just individual high-profile developers) are the ones who are aware of the counterproductive effects patents have on innovation. If only US software companies were like that...
On a slightly related note, Pink Floyd's former manager has spoken out (Barry Collins, PCPro) against trying to stop online music sharing.
What's significant is that it's coming from the manager of a band that sold music under the conventional labels — it's not coming from an independent musician (i.e. outside the system) like Jill Sobule. What's even better is that the arguments against preventing file sharing are both economic and societal in nature — he knows that the most efficient production point is where the price equals the marginal cost of the good, and as the marginal cost of pretty much any digital software/files is $0, the price should follow suit. In addition to this, he realizes that the law is useless as a deterrent because the idea of copying as being wrong has not entered (and will not enter) the social consciousness; on the other hand, frivolous lawsuits will just make consumers resentful.
That said, I must disagree with what quoted economist Will Page says about file sharing sites damaging legitimate sites like Spotify. Looking at the data of pre- and post-DRM-free iTunes vs. music downloads on file sharing sites, iTunes sales shot up like anything after DRM was removed and all songs were set at $0.99, while file sharing music downloads fell off the charts when this happened. People will obtain goods legally if it is easier/more convenient than doing so illegally, and download data supports this.

Pay-to-Pirate

This comes from this article (Reuters through Yahoo! Movies) on how many sites hosting copies of movies are now charging customers to access them.
It's a rather strange turn of events, and one that I do not support, because now, these sites are actually taking revenue from the studios that produced these movies despite offering little to distinguish their copies from the original copies. That said, the benefit to consumers is probably that these uploaded copies are free of the DRM that comes with the original copies — that's what makes them worth buying.
That said, a quote by a Paramount executive (or so the article implies) caught my eye.

But the public needs to know that with such pirated convenience comes the risk of having credit card information ripped off, and problems with spyware contamination are even more common.

What?
They're concerned about spyware contamination on people's computers?
Yes, ripping off credit card information is a real problem, but the spyware contamination bogeyman is nonsense for 2 reasons.
One is that this spyware likely only affects Windows computers. Hence, *nix and Solaris users are probably safe.
The other is that it is positively hypocritical for a Paramount executive to be concerned about spyware contamination through illegally downloaded movies after the Sony-BMG DRM fiasco. After the Sony-BMG music installed rootkits to ensure that the music was legitimate and then wreaked havoc on the user's computer, I have more faith in illegally downloaded movies and music than in DRM-locked movies and music (ideal, of course, would be legally downloaded DRM-free movies and music).

In semi-related news, this article (Mike Masnick, Techdirt) talks about a new appellate court ruling that allows Congress to retroactively reestablish (was that redundant?) copyright over works already in the public domain. Upon reading it, I almost barfed. I can't really add anything to the discussion as the article is very comprehensive and thorough in its explanation and analysis, so I will just ask you to read the article itself (and if you are feeling bold (or bored), read the actual ruling itself, posted right below the article content).

Why Open-Source is not Socialism

I was thinking of writing something on this for a few days, but I got lazy. Then, I saw this (Glyn Moody, The H Open) article, and it gave me the perfect motivation to actually write this.
I'll first sum up what he says, as he covers most of the important stuff. Follow the jump to read more about Linux, Microsoft, capitalism, socialism, cars, and the music industry.

Steve Jobs and Android + India's Copyright Bill

This article (MG Siegler, TechCrunch) talks about Steve Jobs's position on applications on the iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad that have to do with sexually explicit images (a.k.a. prXn). He has said that Apple will not allow such applications, so if one wants to do such things, one should buy a device with competitor Google's Android OS to fulfill such desires.
Follow the jump to see my take on this, as well as my take on India's new copyright bill.

Media Finally Catch On to Ill Effects of DRM

The title is pretty self explanatory, coming from this (Mike Smith, Yahoo! Games) short article.
To sum up, the first two restrictions (single-use codes and multiplayer restrictions) require an additional fee if there is a new owner, while the last two restrictions (digital games and install limitations) have no (legal) workaround at all (i.e. the game is useless after first sale).
It seems like some people in the (non-open-source, non-technical-legal) media finally get why DRM is bad for content like books, music, and video games.
Historically, publishers have only had control over the first sale (and nothing afterwards). These same companies would make quite good profits with this.
However, it seems like many video game companies are becoming especially greedy and intent on taking away consumers' rights to do whatever they please with their purchased property. Now, video game makers not only have control over first sale but over every other transaction afterwards (of that game).
This will kill the highly lucrative used video game and video game rental industries, which have to fork over huge chunks of their revenue just to continue operating (or face the possibility of not being able to operate under any circumstance).
It's the same reason why DRM on music will kill the used music industry (similarly, eBooks with DRM).
Stop the madness now. DRM may increase short-term revenues of companies, but in the long-term, there will be fewer purchases of video games (due to these ill effects) and as a result the industry as a whole will shrink.

Movie Review: Young Frankenstein

This evening, I watched Young Frankenstein (or "Young Fronkensteen", if you will - more on that in a minute) with my family.
It was a great, funny movie. I like how the movie stayed generally true to the original movie plot (except for the ending, of course; in the original, the monster is killed, whereas this movie ends happily with the newly sophisticated monster marrying Elizabeth and Frankenstein with his newly enlarged reproductive organ marrying Inga) while putting in some (maybe not-so-) subtle running gags (like how Frankenstein, to distance himself from his mad scientist grandfather, prefers the pronunciation "Fronkensteen", or how whenever Frau Bluecher's name is said (wherever), the horses neigh).

However, something at the beginning of the movie concerned me. It has nothing at all to do with the actual plot or production of the movie; rather, it is related to the fact that this is a DVD. There is this almost frightening sequence at the beginning by the MPAA about how you wouldn't steal a car or a cell phone, so you also shouldn't illegally download a movie. While this of course means that downloading a movie is currently illegal, what is questionable is how morally wrong/repugnant downloading a movie is compared to stealing a car or a cell phone.
The point is, with all these new technologies involving acquiring professionally created content (e.g. music, books), the legal method has to be easier than the illegal method. With the freeing of music from DRM and other restrictions, illegal downloads of music on P2P networks have dropped precipitously while legitimate sales on sites like the iTunes store have shot up ever since; the reverse is still true (as it once was for restricted (e.g. DRMed) music) for restricted (e.g. DRMed) movies. The MPAA needs to learn now that something like the iTunes store, and not a set of draconian restrictions, is the business model of the age of the Internet.

P2P Is a RESPONSE to a Problem

There's a new article (Jacqui Cheng, Ars Technica) basically summing up a truth about illegal file sharing, with evidence for this as well.
All of the big music stores are now DRM-free. Yet the RIAA has feared massive copyright violations with use of P2P software.
What has this led to? People are legitimately buying DRM-free music and using them appropriately and not illegally downloading them on P2P networks. One reason for this is that P2P networks are meant for large files; music files are small enough to be bought and downloaded off of regular sites.
The bigger reason is that people will legitimately buy content online [I don't know how to make "super-italics" for super-emphasis] IF IT IS EASIER TO DO THAT than to illegally download music. Often, DRM-ed music from P2P sites are of poor quality and may not be the full song, whereas legal music is of great quality and is of full length. Now that legitimate music is DRM-free (while music on P2P sites have cracked DRM), people would rather pay for music than get trashy quality for free.
On the other hand, movies have not gone DRM-free as music has. This means that it is easier to get a lower-quality but unrestricted free copy from a P2P network than it is to get a heavily-restricted, very expensive normal quality copy from another (legitimate) source. The movie industry needs to keep up with the times; given that soon files the size of movies will become very small compared to P2P network capacities (like how music is small compared to current capacities), it would be in the industry's best interests to remove DRM from movies and start selling these movies online.
DRM is a solution to a nonexistent problem, and is in the end a bigger problem than the "problem" it "solves".
Sadly, the RIAA and MPAA will never understand this.

2010 January 28: iPads, Legos, McDonalds, and Toyotas

There are a few things I wanted to touch on today, so I will do so.
Many of you have doubtless heard of Apple's new tablet PC (Mac?), the iPad. As far as I've read, reaction has been lukewarm; the OS is the iPhone OS (not a full Mac OS X), and the thing can't even render certain (many) sites (i.e. those with Adobe Flash) properly; Apple thinks it can get away with it by offering a stand as an accessory. Hah!
More disturbingly (Linux Today), though, it seems like the iPad is chock-full of DRM. I am an opponent of DRM; if DRM existed in the 1980s, when desktop computers were in their infancy, we would be far behind where we are today in terms of computers. Apple is not allowing anyone to install "unauthorized" (i.e. not from the Apple Store) software, calling it a criminal offense even when no copyright laws are broken. This just goes to show that as a computing culture, Apple is even more closed than Microsoft; variety and quality are no doubt hurt by this. Not only is this applied to consumers - even producers can't opt out of this lock-in, especially free software producers who want to maintain their works' licenses like the GPL. Basically, the only person who benefits from this lock-in is Apple, as now, no outside developers can profit at all from this new machine. The Slashdot article on this also mentions that this may portend bad things for Mac OS X's future in terms of openness; surely, it will, given how much more tightly Apple has been clenching its brushed aluminum fist recently.
I want to switch gears now (no pun intended) to talk about Legos. I'm a huge fan of Legos; I happen to be the president of my school's Robotics Club, which uses Lego Mindstorm kits to build and program robots for in-house competitions (and hopefully BotBall in the future) (I talked about this club's raffle fundraiser in a post from 2009 October). The beauty of these things is that they can be put together in virtually any combination; to be sure, 6 bricks of size 2x4 can be put together in over 100 million ways. Here we are, building robots! The possibilities are endless. But I digress...
I watch Tom and Jerry. It comes on Cartoon Network. It is awesome (and I am not ashamed at all to say that). But I digress yet again...
More to the point, on Cartoon Network I see (between Tom and Jerry shorts) a lot of ads, mainly for kids. Many of these ads are for Lego kits, in the forms of Toy Story, Star Wars, etc.
I am saddened to see the proliferation of these assembly-by-instruction-manual kits. For some of the newer kits, there seem to be only a few large pieces that fit together easily, making the thing worse. I am saddened to see this because the whole point of Lego toys was to be able to create anything from one's imagination using the starter parts (and in the case of robots, an RCX and maybe a few motors and wheels (and maybe not even wheels), but nothing else). That is the point of the Lego set; it allows the imagination to proliferate through reality. Here, with these kits, manufacturers have done the imagination; it's just up to the kids to assemble the pieces as they are. This has also been a gradual process; the early kits had only a few more special pieces to make the action figures or whatever, while the current kits seem to have only specialized pieces that can only fit together to make the figure in question. If I need to get gifts for kids (who are old enough to not swallow small parts), I will be getting them Legos - real Legos.
Also on Cartoon Network, I have been seeing a lot of McDonald's ads. I'm not sure why they still need to advertise, but whatever, it's all good. Except, it's not.
The first questionable ad I saw aired around a year ago (maybe it was a little more recent). The ad shows an elementary-school-age soccer match; the winning team is made of trim, athletic kids, while the losing team is slightly more pudgy on the whole. The winning team gets a trophy and rubs it in the losing team's faces, until one of the losing team member's parents get that team McDonald's food to cheer them up. Then, the pudgy kids start rubbing the fact that they have McDonald's (and the winners don't) into the winners' faces, and the winners actually seem to care more about not having McDonald's (than winning).
What?
It's obvious that according to McDonald's, eating McDonald's food and not staying in too good shape is more important than actually winning sports tournaments (or doing more useful things of a similar vein). That is not a good message to send to growing kids. Then again, maybe it's kind of obvious why the team that lost did so. Maybe?
The second ad is still on the air. It shows a bunch of kids looking through a telescope with Ronald McDonald, saying that they can't see anything. Ronald throws a giant handful of magic through the telescope into the sky, displaying a sparkly sky full of stars, nebulae, and fireworks; in the middle of it all is the McDonald's logo.
I initially nitpicked by saying that the kids were able to see the stars before, so they didn't need Ronald, and I was going to extend this into a rant about how poor basic education is these days, but I'm not. The more worrisome thing is the logo in the center of the sky. The message? McDonald's is the center of the universe.
Maybe I should be like Morgan Spurlock: smack a kid every time we drive by McDonald's to make them hate going (or even going by) there.
The last thing I wanted to talk about is the ongoing Toyota recall. Toyota, since the time of my last writing [about this subject], has recalled a few more million vehicles. Yes, you read that right: a few more million. Also, I did not know this before, but Lexus and Scion models are supposed to not be affected as the cars are all built with the Denso accelerators (good), not the CTS (no relation to Cadillac CTS) accelerators (bad) (Denso and CTS are suppliers of accelerator pedals, with, I believe, Denso being Japanese and CTS being American). In any case, do not buy a Toyota, and when buying a Lexus or Scion, consider all of the other alternatives (yes, there are a lot out there, but it's worth researching), and if that becomes the decided vehicle to purchase, exercise extreme caution before purchasing (i.e. take a test drive (or two), thoroughly inspect the vehicle (especially that driver's footwell) for issues, etc.).
There, I'm done.

Can Anyone Say "DRM Sucks"?

For those of you who don't know me too well, I really like The Sims. It's a great game, and I've been playing it since version 1 onto version 2. For TS2, I have the original version with the Nightlife and Seasons expansion packs.
These two are not severely restricted. All expansions after seasons are.
With the release of Spore, for whatever reason, Electronic Arts (EA) became more paranoid about its "intellectual property". It felt that simply disallowing people from copying their game disks wasn't enough, which is what they had been doing for many years using the SafeDisk technology. Since then, they have moved to SecuROM.
SecuROM is a piece of software made by Sony that purports to curb piracy. It does so by actually limiting the number of times that a user can install the game on his/her computer (to around 5 times total, I believe). That's not all, however. Once installed along with the game, SecuROM cannot be removed unless special tools are used. That's right, uninstalling the game does nothing to SecuROM unless you use SecuROM's own uninstaller, and if you do that with the game still installed then the game becomes inoperable; if you then want to reinstall the game, SecuROM shows up again and counts one more install down.
It gets worse, though. Not only does SecuROM limit your installs, it requires that the user have web access or else that user won't be able to play the game; this allows SecuROM to automatically "phone home" to get backdoor updates for itself and continually verify that you are an absolute angel. Furthermore, there has been a huge number of people with SecuROM-tagged games (SPORE, BioShock, Mass Effect, and TS2 expansions after but excluding Seasons) that have lost the functionality of their optical (CD/DVD), USB, and hard drives from having SecuROM on their computers and no way to remove it without also crippling the game in question. In fact, far too many people had to reformat their computers because of SecuROM.
Basically, SecuROM is a computer virus that goes unmentioned in the aforementioned games' EULAs and essentially takes the Windows hostage (as far as I know, Mac versions of the games do not have SecuROM (lucky!)). The word "virus" is not meant to be an analog; in fact, most competent antivirus scanners identify SecuROM as a type of virus (a rootkit, I believe)! What's worse is that this virus is corporate-sponsored for the sole purpose of deterring pirates who were going to hack the game to release it for free anyway. To that end, the SecuROM-tagged games in question had some of the fastest cracking times in history, all of them being cracked and released in under 24 hours after official release.
I was going to get TS2 Bon Voyage today, but after reading about SecuROM I'm glad I saved my $20. I have seen some places say that since Spore, Mass Effect, and BioShock, (i.e. for all of the newer TS2 expansions) SecuROM has removed the install limit, but I still wouldn't trust it lest my hardware totally break down.
The last argument I will make is more about the issues with SecuROM's assumptions about licensing and copyright, so for more information, I strongly recommend reading Free Culture by Lawrence Lessig. It's a great book (available freely online, no copyright violations involved) about the issues of copyrights and licensing and how they all affect us today.
The issue is that SecuROM assumes that by trying to install the game on multiple computers, you are a pirate. Computer pirates make copies of games to give to others and sometimes make profits from them too. The problem with this allegation is that when a pirate makes a copy for someone else, the pirate and the recipient both have the software at a cost to the original software-maker rather than to the pirate. However, if person A wants to show person B the game but they only want to have one copy between them and share it, it will at any point in time be at a cost to one of them rather than to the software-maker; the original maker has not lost anything in this case, and if anything, the other person will be more inclined to buy him/herself the game for the better of the original software-maker. SecuROM calls that piracy. That's like calling your letting your friend read the book you bought for a few hours and then giving it back for you to read piracy; unless you charge him for it, the analogy is nonsense.
Thankfully, TS3 went back to SafeDisk instead of SecuROM, and as I will need a laptop for next year soon and TS3 doesn't support my current video card or RAM specs, I will gladly wait for it along with the new computer.
Folks, please: if you know anyone who wants to buy any of the SecuROM-tagged games listed above, show them this and search for "problems with SecuROM"; that should be enough to convince them otherwise. Thank you EA for ending your addition of SecuROM with games and replacing it again with SafeDisk, and everyone please get together to petition EA for an official way to remove SecuROM without ruining the game or getting sued!