By Cory Doctorow at 1:43 pm Friday, May 18
• Comments • Share
Wired's David Kravets reports from the Copyright Office's triennial hearings on exceptions to the DMCA's rules against breaking DRM. Every three years, public interest groups supplicate themselves before the Copyright Office and beg for our right to jailbreak our devices and look inside our own property. Every three years, entertainment lawyers show up and demand that nothing of the sort come to pass, because their clients can only survive if it's illegal for you to decide what programs you get to run on the devices you buy. It's all rather revolting, legal sausage-making at its wurst.
Christian Genetski, general counsel of the Entertainment Software Association, told the Copyright Office, whose panelists included its top attorneys and Maria Pallante, the register of copyrights, that freeing Americans to bypass access controls on videogame consoles would decimate the gaming business.
“It will gut videogame consoles’ piracy protections,” he said. “We’re here today because our copyright interests are at stake.”
Allowing such jailbreaking, Hofmann countered, would allow the so-called homebrew community of game developers to play their games on the machines, while also allowing researchers to use the consoles like computers in the furtherance of science.
But the regulators were not clear whether the videogame hack was necessary. They suggested scientists could use computers for their research, and homebrew gamers can play those, too, on their computers.
Robert Kasunic, deputy general counsel of the Copyright Office, suggested that the benefits don’t outweigh the tradeoffs to piracy.
“How do you balance, for instance, the use of being able to put Pong on a homebrew system with the numbers we are aware of in terms of videogame piracy?” he asked, noting that millions of videogames are already being shared without authorization on The Pirate Bay.
So yeah, the Copyright Office generally believes that your rights to your actual, physical property are trumped by multinationals' metaphorical property rights in the things they sell you.
It’s Tinkerers v. Hollywood as Copyright Office Mulls New Jailbreaking Rules
By Cory Doctorow at 12:00 pm Wednesday, May 16
• Comments • Share
Yesterday's Canadian Parliamentary session included a moment of dramatic idiocy, when the Tory Minister of Intergovernmental Affairs Dean Del Mastro climbed to his hind limbs to declare that wanting to rip your CDs to listen to them on your MP3 player was like buying a pair of socks and then stealing a pair of shoes to go with them.
“It’s like going to a clothing store and buying a pair of socks and going back and saying by the way it wasn’t socks that I needed, what i really wanted was shoes. So I’m just going take these, I’m gonna format shift from socks to shoes and I’m not gonna pay anything because it was all for my feet,” he says.
A better analogy: it's like buying a bottle of wine and then demanding to drink the liquid in contains from a glass of your choosing.
This is in the context of Canada's disastrous pending copyright law, Bill C-11, which has even worse digital lock rules than the failed US Digital Millennium Copyright Act, a law that's been in force since 1998, suggesting the Tories haven't learned a thing about technology policy over the course of the entire current century.
Mr Del Mastro is the MP for Peterborough, a city outside of Toronto with a large university population. Students of Trent, this guy is your MP. Remember when Sam Bulte lost her "safe" seat because she wouldn't side with the people instead of off-shore copyright giants?
Idiotic Copyright Comparisons in Canadian Parliament
(Thanks, Ben!)
By Cory Doctorow at 12:33 am Friday, May 4
• Comments • Share
Today, May 4, is the International Day Against DRM, the day in which the Free Software Foundation's "Defective By Design" campaign urges you to celebrate DRM-free media and boycott DRM. There are plenty of local events, poster templates, and the DefectiveByDesign page has a lot of suggestions for other ways to participate:
Here's a nice lagniappe: all of O'Reilly's ebooks are 50% off with the code DRMFREE today.
International Day Against DRM — May 4, 2012
By Cory Doctorow at 9:20 pm Thursday, May 3
• Comments • Share
My latest Guardian column, "Why the death of DRM would be good news for readers, writers and publishers," looks at the wider consequences of Tor Books' dropping DRM on its ebooks, and what it would mean for writers and publishers if DRM was dropped across the industry:
oat.
Back when ebook sales began to kick off, most major publishers were still DRM believers — or at least, not overly skeptical of the claims of DRM vendors. They viewed the use of DRM as "better than nothing".
When queried on the competitive implications of giving control over their business relationships to DRM vendors, they were sanguine (if not utterly dismissive). They perceived "converting ebooks" as a technical challenge beyond the average book buyer. For the absence of DRM to make any kind of difference in the marketplace, they believed that book buyers would have to download and install a special program to let them convert Kindle books to display on a Nook (or vice-versa), and they perceived this to be very unlikely.
But it's only the widespread presence of DRM that makes "converting ebooks" into a technical challenge. Your browser "converts" all sorts of graphic formats — GIF, JPEG, PNG, etc — without ever calling your attention to it. You need to take some rather extraordinary steps to find out which format of the graphics on your screen right now are using. Unless you're a web developer, you probably don't even know what the different formats are, nor what their technical differences are. And you don't need to.
Why the death of DRM would be good news for readers, writers and publishers
Here's a
quick clip of me talking to the CBC's As It Happens about
my publisher's decision to drop DRM.
— Cory
By Cory Doctorow at 7:27 pm Thursday, Apr 26
• Comments • Share
An anonymous publishing exec explains to PaidContent how he started to break DRM on the ebooks he bought (they wouldn't open on all his devices unless he did) and how, having broken DRM, he realized that DRM was total bullshit:
I believe this is justified because I realize that when I buy an e-book from Amazon, I’m really buying a license to that content, not the content itself. This is ridiculous, by the way. I feel as if e-book retailers are simply hiding behind that philosophy as a way to further support DRM and scare publishers away from considering a DRM-free world. I’m not going to say where I work, or anything about my company, but I will say that I don’t think DRM is good for the publisher, author or customer. Don’t pro-DRM publishers realize this is one of the key complaints from their customers? I’ve heard plenty of customers tell me that e-book prices need to be low because they’re only buying access to the content, not fully owning it. That needs to change.
The actual process of breaking the DRM was pretty easy. There are plenty of how-to resources that are only a Google search away from you. I’ve now unlocked books from both Amazon and Apple, and I ran into minor hiccups with both. But a bit of digging online and help from a trusted friend got me through it. Now I can read those books on any device I want to. My advice to newbies is to not give up. If you run into a problem, look around and I bet you’ll find the answer online. I think most readers would be able to do this easily. It just requires a bit of detective work and not giving up if you hit a roadblock.
Do I feel “evil”? No, not really. If I was giving these books away, I would, but I’m the only person using them.
“Why I break DRM on e-books”: A publishing exec speaks out
(Thanks, hughillustration!)
By Cory Doctorow at 1:57 pm Wednesday, Apr 25
• Comments • Share
Further to yesterday's announcement that Tor Books, the largest science fiction publisher in the world, would no longer use DRM on its ebooks as of this summer: now Tor UK, a sister company to Tor Books, has announced it will follow suit.
Tor UK, Pan Macmillan’s science fiction and fantasy imprint, has announced today that it will make its ebooks DRM-free over the next three months.
“We know that this is what many Tor authors passionately want. We also understand that readers in this community feel strongly about this,” says Jeremy Trevathan, Pan Macmillan’s Fiction Publisher.
This decision has been made in partnership with our sister company Tor Books, an imprint of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC, in New York. Tor UK is consulting with its authors at the moment and will announce their plans in more detail in due course.
Tor UK E-book Titles to Go DRM-Free
By Cory Doctorow at 7:00 pm Tuesday, Apr 24
• Comments • Share
Charlie Stross has posted a long essay making the case for ebook publishers going DRM-free. It's a good, comprehensive look. I'll be writing something more on this subject later this week, too.
1. The rapid current pace of change in the electronic publishing sector is driven by the consumer electronics and internet industry. It's impossible to make long term publishing plans (3-10 years) without understanding these other industries and the priorities of their players. It is important to note that the CE industry relies on selling consumers new gadgets every 1-3 years. And it is through their gadgets that readers experience the books we sell them. Where is the CE industry taking us?
2. Dropping DRM across all of Macmillans products will not have immediate, global, positive effects on revenue in the same way that introducing the agency model did ...
3. However, relaxing the requirement for DRM across some of Macmillans brands will have very positive public relations consequences among certain customer demographics, notably genre readers who buy large numbers of books (and who, while a minority in absolute numbers, are a disproportionate source of support for the midlist).
4. Longer term, removing the requirement for DRM will lower the barrier to entry in ebook retail, allowing smaller retailers (such as Powells) to compete effectively with the current major incumbents. This will encourage diversity in the retail sector, force the current incumbents to interoperate with other supply sources (or face an exodus of consumers), and undermine the tendency towards oligopoly. This will, in the long term, undermine the leverage the large vendors currently have in negotiating discount terms with publishers while improving the state of midlist sales.
More on DRM and ebooks
By Cory Doctorow at 9:52 am Tuesday, Apr 24
• Comments • Share
Today, Tor Books, the largest science fiction publisher in the world, announced that henceforth all of its ebooks would be completely DRM-free. This comes six weeks after an antitrust action against Tor's parent company, Macmillan USA, for price-fixing in relation to its arrangements with Apple and Amazon.
Now that there is a major publisher that has gone completely DRM-free (with more to follow, I'm sure; I've had contact with very highly placed execs at two more of the big six publishers), there is suddenly a market for tools that automate the conversion and loading of ebooks from multiple formats and vendors.
For example, I'd expect someone to make a browser plugin that draws a "Buy this book at BN.com" button on Amazon pages (and vice-versa), which then facilitates auto-conversion between the formats. I'd also expect BN.com to produce a "switch" toolkit for Kindle owners who want to go Nook (and vice-versa).
I think that this might be the watershed for ebook DRM, the turning point that marks the moment at which all ebooks end up DRM-free. It's a good day.
Tom Doherty Associates, publishers of Tor, Forge, Orb, Starscape, and Tor Teen, today announced that by early July 2012, their entire list of e-books will be available DRM-free.
“Our authors and readers have been asking for this for a long time,” said president and publisher Tom Doherty. “They’re a technically sophisticated bunch, and DRM is a constant annoyance to them. It prevents them from using legitimately-purchased e-books in perfectly legal ways, like moving them from one kind of e-reader to another.”
DRM-free titles from Tom Doherty Associates will be available from the same range of retailers that currently sell their e-books. In addition, the company expects to begin selling titles through retailers that sell only DRM-free books.
Tor/Forge E-book Titles to Go DRM-Free
By Cory Doctorow at 8:55 am Thursday, Apr 19
• Comments • Share
Dave sez, "Want to watch your HBO subscription on DirecTV over HDMI? Good luck with that. Without any proactive customer outreach, DirecTV rolled out a misguided anti-piracy update last week that now requires an encrypted connection between the set-top and television to view HBO. In theory only very old HDTVs lack this 'HDMI Copy Protection' (HDCP). However, DirecTV's implementation appears flaky as some newer, capable sets are also impacted and no longer able to display HBO over HDMI. DirecTV's response to customers: switch to component cables. Which, incidentally, are easier to capture content from."
I reached out to both HBO and DirecTV for comment. HBO indicates their copy protection policies haven’t recently changed, while DirecTV’s rep confirms a HDCP requirement for premium channels when using HDMI connections and suggests customers with older TVs switch to component cables. I’d say this is anti-consumer and a misguided approach to reducing piracy as it’s much easier to archive video traveling via an analog component connection. Unless DirecTV or HBO’s ultimate intent is to provide lower resolution 540p video over component…
What makes this move particularly offensive is, unlike Blu-ray’s analog sunset, DirecTV’s lockdown is occurring on deployed hardware – with no outreach, knowledge base articles (that I can find), and essentially breaking formerly working customer configurations. Impacted subscribers can give up HDMI for component clutter or buy new televisions. Nice?
DirecTV Blocks HBO Over HDMI (without HDCP)
(Thanks, Dave!)
By Cory Doctorow at 7:23 am Monday, Apr 2
• Comments • Share
My latest Publishers Weekly column is "A Whip to Beat Us With," which describes how publishers who allow retailers to add DRM to their products hand those retailers a commercial advantage to exercise over the publishers themselves.
Jim C. Hines’s e-books are marketed both through a big publisher and solo. The books that were re-priced by Amazon were his solo titles—unagented, and unrepresented by a major publisher. As an individual, Jim has no leverage over Amazon. Not so Macmillan, which controls a much larger number of SKUs and has much more leverage. Macmillan made headlines during its tense standoff with Amazon in 2011 over e-book pricing, but the publisher was able to sway Amazon because it could make a credible threat that it might get up from the negotiating table and take all its books, too—and others might follow.
But Macmillan’s edge—its scale—is also its undoing. Every day, Macmillan sells more e-books that have been locked into Amazon’s format. The millions of dollars that Amazon customers spend on Macmillan’s DRM-locked e-books represent millions of dollars of e-books Macmillan customers lose if they wanted to follow Macmillan away from Amazon. Publishers believe DRM protects their books. But DRM has created a world where publishers who walk away from negotiations with a DRM vendor like Amazon leave their customers behind.
Not just Macmillan. Any publisher that sees a substantial portion of its income from DRM vendors becomes little more than a commodity supplier to those vendors. If Hachette or HarperCollins decided to bite the bullet and pull their titles from Amazon during a dispute, how many of their authors would stay with them, knowing that the world’s largest bookseller and most popular e-book platform no longer carried their titles?
To appreciate this vulnerability, just look at what happened in February with the Independent Publishers Group, a distributor that asked Amazon to hold the line on its discount. They weren’t able to reach an agreement, and Amazon removed all IPG’s e-books from the Kindle store. The day that happened, IPG sent out a communique describing the situation and asking its readers to avoid the Kindle store in future.
A Whip to Beat Us With
This is also available as a podcast (MP3).
By Cory Doctorow at 12:48 pm Saturday, Mar 31
• Comments • Share
A group of researchers at Drexel University have demonstrated a method of recovering credit card details and other sensitive information from used Xbox 360s, even after they have been "reset to factory defaults." The method is straightforward and uses readily available tools. Ashley Podhradsky, one of the Drexel researchers, says, "Microsoft does a great job of protecting their proprietary information. But they don't do a great job of protecting the user's data."
Which is to say that Microsoft is spending a lot of money and resource in ensuring that your Xbox 360 only runs software that is authorized by Microsoft (like Apple and iOS and Nintendo and the Wii/3DS, Microsoft charges money for the right to sell software that will play on your device). But they don't pay any particular attention to protecting your interests as the owner of the device.
What's more, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which regulates the breaking of software locks, makes it illegal to investigate the internal workings of devices like the Xbox 360, and to publish the details of your findings, where those findings might also aid people in choosing to run unauthorized software on their own property.
Podhradsky, along with colleagues Rob D'Ovidio and Cindy Casey at Drexel and Pat Engebretson at Dakota State University, bought a refurbished Xbox 360 from a Microsoft-authorized retailer last year. They downloaded a basic modding tool and used it to crack open the gaming console, giving them access to its files and folders. After some work, they were able to identify and extract the original owner's credit card information.
We reached out to Microsoft for comment on this issue, but as of press time, they have not yet responded.
Podhradsky isn't even a gamer, she says. For seasoned modders and hackers, the process might be even easier.
"A lot of them already know how to do all this," she said. "Anyone can freely download a lot of this software, essentially pick up a discarded game console, and have someone's identity."
..."I think Microsoft has a longstanding pattern of this," Podhradsky said. "When you go and reformat your computer, like a Windows system, it tells you that all of your data will be erased. In actuality that's not accurate—the data is still available... so when Microsoft tells you that you're resetting something, it's not accurate. There's a lot more that needs to be done."
Hackers Can Steal Credit Card Information From Your Old Xbox, Experts Tell Us (via /.)
(Image: Red Ring of Death: RRoD 1 Microsoft Xbox 360, a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from tomasland's photostream)
Kyle Orland writes that Sony is
preventing customers from re-downloading games they've already paid for, because code flaws in them may be used to run unsigned code on the portable console. The hack is reportedly useful only for homebrew, not for piracy. [Ars]
— Rob
By Cory Doctorow at 7:29 pm Wednesday, Mar 21
• Comments • Share
Aziz Ansari, an extremely funny standup comedian, has just released "Dangerously Delicious," a comedy special that follows Louis CK's Live at the Beacon Theater DIY, DRM-free concert video, which netted CK over a million dollars. Ansari, who was an outspoken critic of SOPA and PIPA, is also asking for $5 for his DRM-free download, and has a very good ecommerce setup for buying and downloading the video, and is also using it to promote an upcoming tour.
Ansari isn't the only comedian who's trying this. As Mike Masnick notes on Techdirt, Jim Gaffigan is also following suit. Masnick laments that both Ansari and Gaffigan are slavishly copying CK's exact methodology, and wishes that each would experiment some with pricing, delivery and so on, in order to learn if there are ways of improving on CK's experiment.
The one thing that concerns me a little about this is the fact that the deal terms are identical. I can understand why they're doing this. It's basically "don't mess with what worked for Louis." But I worry that the message people are getting is "$5 direct offering off a website is the secret." I don't think that's it. Lots of people have offered up a product for download off their website for a variety of prices. The key to making it work is not just the pricing. It's the way the offering is presented. I think it would be even cooler if some of these comedians experimented a bit more with branching out creatively around this business model. It wouldn't be hard, for example, to build on what various musicians have done, and offer up different tiers of support. Or something else. The real opportunity here is in how it's presented -- in a way that treats fans as fans, rather than assuming they're criminals or that there needs to be a big impersonal gatekeeper in-between the fans and the artist. But, unfortunately, some are going to look at these experiments and say "the lesson" is "$5 off your website is the secret." And when that doesn't work for some content creators, they're not going to understand why.
By Rob Beschizza at 12:20 pm Friday, Mar 16
• Comments • Share
Here's Molly Wood on UltraViolet, the harebrained new scheme whereby people take their DVDs into stores to pay for them to be ripped to region-locked, time-limited DRM-laden streamable formats:
It is appalling to me to hear John Aden, executive vice president for general merchandising for Wal-Mart, say that this move is about helping consumers enjoy their own DVDs into the Digital Age. "We've all recognized that consumers have sunk lots and lots of money into these DVD libraries," he said. Really? But clearly not enough money, right? Or Hollywood wouldn't be trying so hard to get them to replace those libraries with new! better! Blu-ray! discs!, or trying to charge them a fee to access digital copies of content they already bought that they should have a fair use right to rip for free at home.
It's interesting how all this relies upon the suggestion the that DVD ripping is prohibited in any meaningful sense. The industry claims this in the vain hope anyone is stupid enough to believe it or care, these hucksters do it because they sell worthless services to stupid people, and critics do it because it highlights how stupid the industry is. [CNET] Thanks, Glenn!
