HBR w/o DRM —

Mary sez, "Following the lead of Baen, O'Reilly Media, and Tor, the Harvard Business Review has decided to go DRM free." They say, "We make our ebooks available to you DRM-free so you can read them on the device of your choice. We trust that our customers will abide by copyright law and refrain from distributing ebook files illegally. Please note that in the case that you download a PDF, it will be personalized with your email address." — Cory •

On the terminal nature of copyright licenses —

A fine observation from the clever Kevin Marks, about the fact that your "license" to use you DRM media (ebooks, games, music) expires when you die: "How is it that copyright lasts 70 years after death, but licenses expire at death?" (via Techdirt) — Cory •

Last month, I gave a talk called "The Coming Civil War Over General Purpose Computing" at DEFCON, the Long Now, and Google. We're going to have a transcript with the slides on Monday, but in the meantime, here's a video of the Long Now version of the talk. Stewart Brand summarized it thus:

Doctorow framed the question this way: "Computers are everywhere. They are now something we put our whole bodies into---airplanes, cars---and something we put into our bodies---pacemakers, cochlear implants. They HAVE to be trustworthy."

Sometimes humans are not so trustworthy, and programs may override you: "I can’t let you do that, Dave." (Reference to the self-protective insane computer Hal in Kubrick’s film "2001." That time the human was more trustworthy than the computer.) Who decides who can override whom?

The core issues for Doctorow come down to Human Rights versus Property Rights, Lockdown versus Certainty, and Owners versus mere Users.

Cory Doctorow: Coming War Against Your Computer Freedom

You'll recall that Tor Books (and its sister science fiction imprints of Macmillan publishers around the world) has dropped DRM on all of its titles. Hachette, one of Macmillan's rivals in the "Big Six" pantheon of publishers, is famously pro-DRM (one Hachette author told me that her editor said that Hachette's unbreakable policy, straight from the top, is that no books will be acquired by Hachette if there are any DRM-free editions, anywhere in the world).

My latest Publishers Weekly column reports on a leaked letter, signed by Hachette's Little, Brown UK's CEO, that has been sent to authors whose books are published by both Tor and Hachette imprints in different territories. In the letter, Hachette instructs the author to demand that Tor leave the DRM intact on the books that both publishers produce, and warns that future contracts will require that authors who sign with Hachette in one territory only use pro-DRM publishers in other territories.

It's an astonishing combination of chutzpah and denialism:

I’ve just seen a letter sent to an author who has published books under Hachette’s imprints in some territories and with Tor Books and its sister companies in other territories (Tor is part of Macmillan). The letter, signed by Hachette’s Little, Brown U.K. CEO Ursula Mackenzie, explains to the author that Hachette has “acquired exclusive publication rights in our territories from you in good faith,” but warns that in other territories, Tor’s no-DRM policy “will make it difficult for the rights granted to us to be properly protected.” Hachette’s proposed solution: that the author insist Tor use DRM on these titles. “We look forward to hearing what action you propose taking.”

The letter also contains language that will apparently be included in future Hachette imprint contracts, language that would require authors to “ensure that any of his or her licensees of rights in territories not licensed under this agreement” will use DRM.

It’s hard to say what’s more shocking to me: the temerity of Hachette to attempt to dictate terms to its rivals on the use of anti-customer technology, or the evidence-free insistence that DRM has some nexus with improving the commercial fortunes of writers and their publishers. Let’s just say that Hachette has balls the size of Mars if it thinks it can dictate what other publishers do with titles in territories where it has no rights.

Doubling Down on DRM

Update: In a pair of tweets, the @HachetteUK account sends this correction: "Sorry to be a pedant, but in your DRM article you refer to Ursula Mackenzie as our UK CEO when in fact she is the CEO of Little, Brown UK, part of the HUK group. Our Group CEO is Tim Hely Hutchinson. Thanks."

Yesterday, noted security researcher (and Google employee) Tavis Ormandy published his discovery that Ubisoft's UPlay DRM installs a browser plugin that leaves your computer terribly vulnerable to drive-by attacks over the Internet. The plugin is meant to allow Ubisoft to start games on your computer over the Internet, but it lacks an effective authentication mechanism. This means that an attacker could check your browser to see if you have Ubisoft's DRM installed, and if it finds it, cause the plugin to run malicious software that hijacks your computer.

An early report on Hacker News characterized this as a "rootkit," which triggered a long (and tedious) debate about the formal definition of rootkits and whether Ubisoft's system qualified. To me, this seems rather beside the point, which is that Ubisoft's overall installation process involves a high degree of secrecy and obfuscation, because none of Ubisoft's users want DRM (some may not mind it, but it's a rare gamer who says, "Please install software on my computer that watches what I do and orders my computer to prevent me from doing things that displease a distant corporation"). As a result, security vulnerabilities that arise from sloppiness (or malice) are more difficult to discover and to put right.

PC Gamer got a rare and terse quote from Ubisoft on the issue, in which the company says it is "looking into" the issue, later updated with the statement that a "forced patch" has been issued to fix the issue (though this claim hasn't been independently verified by any source I can find).

There's more commentary on TorrentFreak, which places the DRM in context -- "seen as an essential part of life for many games developers." The Slashdot thread on the issue is lively, but also full of deeply misinformed legal speculation about which laws Ubisoft may or may not have broken in the process.

Following up from their announcement earlier this year, all ebooks from Tor/Forge -- the largest science fiction publisher in the world -- are now DRM free, in all ebook stores, for all platforms. I'm incredibly proud to be published by Tor, and moreso today.

“It’s clear to us that this is what our customers want,” said senior editor Patrick Nielsen Hayden. “We see it in the success of SF publishers like Baen and Angry Robot that have preceded us in going DRM-free. To the best of our knowledge we’re the first division of a Big Six publishing conglomerate to go down this road, but we doubt very much that we’ll be the last.”

The new DRM-free editions are available from the same retailers that have sold Tor e-books in the past. In addition, the company expects to begin selling titles through retailers that sell only DRM-free books.

Tor/Forge E-Books Are Now DRM-Free

James Losey sez,

The Open Internet Tools Project (OpenITP) is a collection of open source projects that help build a truly unfettered internet -- private, anonymous and resistant to control. In the week before HOPE in New York City, OpenITP has partnered with FreedomBox, InformSec and ISOC-NY to host a circumvention tools hackfest. OpenITP's James Vasile writes:

"We've got four days to plan, code and learn! If you want to hack on anti-censorship or anti-surveillance tools, bring your project, bring your skills and bring your friends. This event will be focused on writing code and solving design problems. We won't have any long presentations (there will be enough of those at HOPE), though we will have lightning talks and will give away a door prize or two."

Circumvention Tools Hackfest in NYC before HOPE

From Melbourne's Astor Theatre, a harrowing tale of the way that the DRM on digital projectors -- intended to stop exhibitors from leaking high-quality videos onto the Internet -- can interfere with legitimate exhibition. Punishing the innocent to get at the guilty is never a good answer, morally or commercially. The most secure way to manage theatrical exhibition is to ban it altogether; the DRM scheme used by digital projectors comes pretty close to that "solution."

Unlike 35mm film prints that are tangible, come on spools, and run through a mechanical projector, DCPs are files that are ingested into the digital projector which is in many ways simply a very high-tech computer system. Because the physical file is ingested into a projector it can – if the cinema has enough space on its server – be kept there indefinitely and so, having created this situation themselves, the studios and distributors lock the files so that they can only be screened at the times scheduled, booked and paid for by the cinema. This means each DCP comes with what is called a KDM (Key Delivery Message). The KDM unlocks the content of the file and allows the cinema to play the film. It is time sensitive and often is only valid from around 10 minutes prior to the screening time and expiring as close to 5 minutes after the scheduled time. Aside from the obvious fact that this means screenings really do need to run according to scheduled time, it is also means the projectionist can’t test to see if the KDM works or that the quality of the film is right before show time. This isn’t always a problem. But when it is…

When it is a problem we have what happened last night. The KDM we received for Take Shelter didn’t work. We discovered this about ten minutes prior to show time. Being a cinema, and holding evening screenings we couldn’t just call the distributor to get another one because they work office hours. So, our steps began with calling a 24 hour help line in the US. Once we went through the process of authenticating our cinema and scheduled screening we were told we had to call London to authorise another KDM for this particular screening. After calling London and re-authenticating our cinema and session, we were told we could be issued another KDM, but not before the distributor also authorised it. This meant another 5-10 minute delay as we waited for the distributor to confirm that we were indeed allow to show the film at this time. Once confirmation was received we waited for the new KDM to be issued. The KDM arrives as an email zip attachment that then needs to be unzipped, saved onto a memory stick and uploaded onto the server. This takes another 5-10 minutes. Once uploaded the projector needs to recognise the KDM and unlock the programmed presentation. Thankfully, this worked. However, until the very moment when it did we were as unsure as our audience as to whether or not the new KDM would work and therefore whether or not our screening would actually go ahead.

This is one example of one incident in one cinema. There are thousands upon thousands of screenings at cinemas just like us all over the world constantly experiencing these same issues.

What Happened Last Night

(Image: Ozone projectionist, a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike (2.0) image from gawler_history's photostream)

Today I appeared in a group presentation of Tor Books authors -- Charlie Stross, John Scalzi and me -- and Macmillan USA's Executive Vice President for Digital Publishing and Technology -- Fritz Foy -- at Book Expo America in New York City. We were there to explain to the publishing world why Tor Books is the first major publisher to go DRM-free for its ebooks, and what's coming next:

In addition, Foy officially announced that a new Tor/Forge DRM-free e-book store will debut here on Tor.com in late summer, 2012.

Tor.com has a write-up of our remarks. I believe there'll be a video soon, as well.

Tor Books Announces E-book Store: Doctorow, Scalzi & Stross Talk DRM-Free

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

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!)

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:

• Pledge to take action on May 4th
• Put up a banner or widget for Day Against DRM (or make your own!)
• Share a link to this page on your social networks
• Start your own event for May 4th
• Read a long article by Katherine Noyes over at PCWorld, entitled It's Time to Give Digital [Restrictions] Management the Boot.

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