Note: This is a seattlepi.com reader blog. It is not written or edited by the P-I. The authors are solely responsible for content. E-mail us at newmedia@seattlepi.com if you consider a post inappropriate..

DRM Drama: The Future of Reading (A Play in Six Acts)

|

Mark Pilgrim has created a clever little piece, The Future of Reading ( A Play in Six Acts), about the inherent dangers of Digitial Rights Management (DRM).

Using sources like Steven Levy’s Newsweek article The Future of Reading, Kindle’s Terms of Service, Jeff Bezos 2002 letter to the Author’s Guild and George Orwell’s 1984, Pilgrim adequately conveys some of the pitfalls of the DRM approach.

The six acts are:
1. The act of buying
2. The act of giving
3. The act of lending
4. The act of reading
5. The act of remembering
6. The act of learning

Here is Act 1:

When someone buys a book, they are also buying the right to resell that book, to loan it out, or to even give it away if they want. Everyone understands this.

Jeff Bezos, Open letter to Author’s Guild, 2002

You may not sell, rent, lease, distribute, broadcast, sublicense or otherwise assign any rights to the Digital Content or any portion of it to any third party, and you may not remove any proprietary notices or labels on the Digital Content. In addition, you may not, and you will not encourage, assist or authorize any other person to, bypass, modify, defeat or circumvent security features that protect the Digital Content.

Amazon, Kindle Terms of Service, 2007

***********************************************

Image is a mashup of the Newsweek cover courtesy Steve Lawson’s library weblog See Also, with the text coming from the All your base gaming term.

Thanks to fade theory for the lead

Michael Lieberman
http://blog.seattlepi.com/bookpatrol/2007/11/29/drm-drama-the-future-of-reading-a-play-in-six-acts/
blog.seattlepi.com
crawl=CC-MAIN-2014-10
94536
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:TOW2PZFS5WZKF2PJG2O72PD3SJ6JVK46
<urn:uuid:6d63df24-74ed-43cb-b933-9600d000db09>
2014-03-12T11:46:34Z
23.0.160.18
sha1:FCIHBNYG7VTHWKBOY7YILPI6P63KEHPF
<urn:uuid:1a138c80-7f6f-459a-9a25-10b42d5d3ba9>
http://blog.seattlepi.com/bookpatrol/2007/11/29/drm-drama-the-future-of-reading-a-play-in-six-acts/
response
<urn:uuid:eb382f05-2a9b-4469-a916-c8fdcf0a29de>
robots: classic
hostname: ip-10-183-142-35.ec2.internal
software: Nutch 1.6 (CC)/CC WarcExport 1.0
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2014-10
operator: CommonCrawl Admin
description: Wide crawl of the web with URLs provided by Blekko for March 2014
publisher: CommonCrawl
format: WARC File Format 1.0
conformsTo: http://bibnum.bnf.fr/WARC/WARC_ISO_28500_version1_latestdraft.pdf