DRM - digital rights management

I must have missed it but apparently yesterday was a coordinated day against the use of DRM in eBooks with events being staged around the world - in cities including Cincinnati; Orlando; San Francisco; Boston; Madrid; Rome; Manchester; Nagoya, London, Japan; and Aveiro, Portugal.

The Archive has always been against DRM and would have liked to attend one of these events but I never knew anything about it, until I opened my inbox this morning and saw half a dozen emails informing me that the day had been and gone.

It looks like we are coming towards the end of the use of DRM in eBooks - many of Amazons titles no longer carry DRM and recently Tor Publishing announced they were dropping DRM across all its titles by this July.

While DRM has largely been defeated in downloaded music, it is a growing problem in the area of ebooks, where people have had their books restricted so they can't freely loan, re-sell, or donate them, read them without being tracked, or move them to a new device without re-purchasing all of them,” the advocacy group wrote in its announcement of the event. “They've even had their ebooks deleted by companies without their permission.”

 Remember a few year ago when Amazon had been offering George Orwell's 1984 thinking it was public domain title, and then discovered it wasn't and so they automatically deleted it from Kindles across the globe. Now obviously Amazon had to stop offering the title in their stores, but rather than storm in and forcefully remove it from user's Kindles what they should have done was pay the copyright owners for the books dowloaded and then simply stop offering the book. It was that action that stopped me buying a Kindle for a good long while and instead adopted a Sony eReader. Mind you I'm a Kindle convert now and wouldn't give the Sony a second glance. But I do from time to time worry about the amount of control Amazon have over the global eBook trade - I would hate to see a day when Amazon are the only player on the market.

I'd like to see the day when you could buy a eBook anywhere for any device and freely swap it between devices, so something bought from Barnes and Noble would run on Amazon's Kindle and vice versa. Well, with the death of DRM we are heading towards that day,

We are gathered to witness the death of DRM

The US Department of Justice's look into alleged eBook price fixing has thrown up an interesting side issue in the use of the despised DRM or digital rights management.

The industry say that DRM is used to stop people pirating eBooks but in truth in terms of piracy DRM is ineffectual, and all DRM does is lock users into one type of platform for using eBooks they have bought and paid for.

Imagine a situation where your CD's could only be used on a player supplied by the record company, or a book that could only be read using a lamp made by Random House - and that's pretty much DRM in a nutshell.

DRM exists primarily as a way to control how consumers access purchased content. A side effect of this is that DRM can be used to lock people into a particular platform or service. And the really insidious thing about this is that people are unaware that they are being locked into a platform or service. ZD NET

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Many people don't understand DRM but what it means is that if I buy an eBook from say Amazon, I can't then use it on my Sony eReader and quite often visa versa. I've no doubt that DRM will go the way of the dodo though - it always has in the past and Apple themselves removed DRM from music bought in their store when Amazon started selling DRM free MP3'S.

  "Amazon uses DRM to lock people in. If you later want to "drop out of Kindle, you lose all your books. eBooks without DRM technology are easily shareable between users, just like print books," and therefore, "books without DRM are more valuable to readers." 

It is estimated that within five years there will be  four billion media-enabled mobile phones on the market. That's an incredibly huge opportunity for content providers . These providers will not want the headache of numerous file types and for books will most likely settle on ePub which can be read across a number of devices and this will, of course, mean no DRM. So DRM, much misuderstood beast that it is, will eventually roll over and no longer trouble us, but while it remains it is causing problems and not for people who want to pirate eBooks, they have long found a way around DRM, but for organisations such as The British Library.

The British Library is continuing its campaign against the threat of digital rights management (DRM) technology to the management of UK cultural data.
The British Library is tackling the undefined nature of IP rights in the digital age, as embodied in UK law, with DRM implementations being increasingly unforgiving for libraries and public bodies.

Defective by Design are an organization fighting the use of DRM in all digital media and they have some interesting points to make on their website HERE.