My library offers free downloadable ebooks and audiobooks via Overdrive. Since the number of “digital copies” is limited, I still have to go on the waitlist sometimes, and it is always shorter for the drm crippled wma files than the mp3s.

Now this is just nuts… they have a limit on how many copies can be “checked out” at any one time and have a waiting list???

It’s a DRM’d file, it should expire without having to require the borrower to return it so someone else can then “borrow” it… some software designer has gone to a lot of trouble to implement this ridiculous dead tree limitation to a digital file???

Anyway, I am glad I am purchasing only Multiformat titles and download them in good old PDF.

BTW, I don’t “share” those books via bittorrent or such, but I do occasionally give a copy to friends, much like I lend them “hardcopy” books I own.

What gets folks up in arms is when people upload the files to filesharing sites and thousands of people download it. That’s a huge loss for both the publisher and author.

While some people feel authors and pubs are loaded and can afford it, the price we small press pay to be truly independent without kissing the behind of mass production and handing over a huge percentage of the author’s royalties to them is that we need those sales, and something like that really kills our overhead.

Sermon aside, this kind of issue is why we chose to avoid most third-party distributors – you not only have to give up a percentage off the cover price, but you’re subject to their foibles and decisions with no real input. I’ve had readers tell me they prefer to go to the publisher site to buy them, and that may be your safest bet in some cases.

However, Fictionwise is the only third party distributor we do utilize. They have an great rep, and their people have always been both straightforward and professional in all dealings with me. So I feel fairly confident that they’ll handle this competently as well.

I have 4 books that are affects: 2 Mary Gentle ones (the Ilario series) and 2 Terry Pratchett ones. :( It’s bad enough the Pterry has put a “bad listener, do NOT copy or share my stuff!” notice on his Audible.com audiobooks. Now even the ebooks are affected by this DRM crap.

I hates it, but I’m too lazy to find the stuff that’s not legal.

This is a good thing in my mind

Otherwise, the rights-holder ends up with a copyright period longer (by a factor of infinity) than the law allows, no?

If I listened to all those lectures and podcasts correctly, copyright is control that is granted to the creator of a work, for a limited period of time. It’s not freedom to copy that is granted to the public after a limited period of time.

Why hasn’t the law caught up with this, rather than concentrating of extending the Disney Corp.’s copyright on Mickey Mouse?

Imagine the scene:
“You can buy this digital book for the same price as the dead-tree version..[Yeah, look up examples of THIS madness on Amazon..]..even as the cost of ‘printing’ and delivering it is pretty much ZERO!

And if you loose your license-file or -device, or if the creator of the software decides they’d rather be sailing, and you need to get another copy of the book for whatever device you’re using now…then you’re screwed. Royally.

But if you wait 95 years, ‘cuz the author died last week, you can get a DRM-free version.”

Yeah, that’d really spur sales…

IMHO, anyone who willingly (and knowingly?) purchases DRM material deserves whatever happens to them. So far, I’ve loaded/read 535 documents (books, articles, essays, and research papers) on my iLiad, none of which are DRMed. All acquired legally. It’s just not that difficult.

You lend people books? You thief!

Next you’ll be telling us you buy and sell books “secondhand”, thus depriving publishers and authors of yet more revenue opportunities.

I’m glad that the dawn of the eBook will soon make such activities a thing of the past.

The default value is that any creation (literature, image, or invention) is that it is the property of The Commons (as in here: http://www.iascp.org/). That’s why laws have to be passed in order for copyright to exist – copyright is given to the creator of a work by the laws.

DRM is a means to reflect natural difficulty that usual/older methods of distribution made wholesale copying difficult or impractical – a non-state-enforced means of ‘enforcing’ copyright. Paper books, paintings, VHS tapes, what have you, are expensive to copy and almost always are “infidèle” – not exact copies. This method of ‘enforcement’ doesn’t apply for works in a non-encrypted digital form – perfect copies can be made ad-quasi-infinitum.

Well, rather than looking at the intent of the DRM (that is, to protect the rights’ holder(s), um, rights) look at the effect:

As in the case here:
The OverDrive has decided to stop offering the service/product and didn’t release the private keys to Fictionwise or some third-party escrow. These could decrypt the work permanently, rather than ‘right now, while you’re looking at it on this device’.

Some sort of escrow scheme (or, say, a distributed key-sharing scheme like here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secret_sharing) should have been set up from the start so that the keys would be release upon expiration of the copyright. Remember, at the copyright expires, the Digital Rights belong to The Commons, not to OverDrive, Fictionwise, nor to the creators of the works.

So, after the posted date, you won’t be able to d/l a copy of the work encrypted for the specific device they are meant to be read on, which is selected at the time of d/l.

Which means, as long as the device still works, you can read it. From Steve Pendergrast’s post @ 28:
“People can still download their books before those servers go offline and keep reading them on whatever device they download to, probably for years.” [My emphasis]

Muc later, when the copyright expires, the work returns to The Commons. Problem is, the work is/might not be available in an unencrypted form.

Thus the copyright by the use of this DRM extends into near-infinity, given what we understand about state of the art encryption methods. Which is something that the law doesn’t allow. (This offer may be void in places that think the DCMA is a god-send…)

If I sold you a record, in a locked box, I wouldn’t have to give you the key when the copyright was up.

The DRM, like the box, is determining what you can physically do with the music, not protecting the copyright of it.

making arguments against their ability to claim perpetual ownership of digital files points to the reason it is makes sense to sell perpetual ownership rights in the first place.

doesn’t the fact that they say it’s unrealistic to expect them to maintain permanent files point to the conclusion that it makes sense to just sell the product and the file maintenance to the buyer? like we normally do when we sell books, and other recordings?

I just download the wma files and then “record what you hear” via Audacity to make them into mp3s, so that I can actually use them how I want. I’ve never uploaded them, or distributed them, and I haven’t felt the need to re-listen to them after the “expiration” date, so I just delete them anyway.

Sometimes, when I’m particularly lazy, I’ll “check out” a wma copy and just torrent an “illegal” mp3.

As long as it’s harder to be honest, I’ll never truly give up being a “thief”.

That’s not really true.

“The books you paid for disappear” subtitle on this post is quite misleading. The books keep working even after jan 31, plus we’re providing replacements in eReader format, a format that can be moved from one device to another without re-encryption.

Fictionwise is working very hard to make sure our books continue to be readable long term. We’ve already replaced 80% of the affected books and we’re working to cover the rest in the coming weeks. Our own eReader format is unique in that it does not even require a re-download to work when a customer changes their device. We’ve worked with industry groups on ideas like ebook escrows, and we’ve pushed unencrypted ebooks at every opportunity.

Of course, we agree that DRM causes problems (and this situation is an example to be sure), and we’d prefer if we could sell all our ebooks unencrypted. We probably sell more unencrypted books than just about anyone. But right now the larger publishers don’t allow it. It’s either sell with DRM or not at all.

I’m Steve Pendergrast, one of the owners of Fictionwise.

This posting is highly misleading.

Nobody is losing *any* ebooks due to this change. The ebooks *do not* stop functioning after the servers go down. You simply can’t re-download them again. If you back up your files properly you can continue to read them indefinitely.

Secondly, Fictionwise is actively replacing the books from a source that we control and can maintain indefinitely. We’ve already replaced 80% of the books that are affected. In the coming weeks we’ll replace more and more of them. This will give our customers ways of downloading the books again even if they do not properly back them up.

Fictionwise has been an advocate of unencrypted books for a long time, and we actually don’t like DRM, but large publishers currently require it so we have no choice if we want to sell most big-name author books. So don’t get me wrong, we prefer to sell unencrypted books and we devote half our front page and half our newsletters to those kinds of books for that reason.

But let’s not overstate the anti-drm case here. People can still download their books before those servers go offline and keep reading them on whatever device they download to, probably for years. The servers going down does NOT stop your books from working. In addition, we’re working to make the books available in another format, eReader, that is not tied to device ids so even when you change your device you’ll still have your content going forward. 80% of the affected books are already available in eReader format for our customers, and our goal is to get that to 100% in the coming weeks.

-Steve Pendergrast

The DS is like 110 bucks, and the homebrew cartridge + microsd 8gig card will be about 60-70 bucks added.

But it is also an awesome handheld gaming device – will play regular DS games, Gameboy Advance games, as well as supporting NES and SNES emulators. Totally worth it. I think it’s major issue is that .txt is the best format – it seems to have PDF viewing problems.

Fictionwise is one of the good guys. I’ve spoken to Steve Pendergrast, one of their head honchos, and he’d really rather do without DRM altogether if he could, but it’s the publishers who insist upon it.

Might I suggest this would make a great thing to talk about if you’re going to send in your comments to the FTC for their Open House about DRM?

Huh. Zippo doesn’t seem to have a problem with a lifetime product guarantee.

What is it, like, 90% of startups go under in the first year? So those of you saying “Good, hope this keeps happening” – don’t worry, it will keep happening, a lot.

At some point, the publishers will notice that every time they sell the rights over to a DRM’d audiobook service, their customers eat poop. That’s the point that they’ll either decide that the Internet is full of evil, and begin to withdraw completely back to dead trees (FAIL, sooner or later); OR they finally stop insisting on their partners using DRM.