Pruning Shears

No Associated Press content was harmed in the writing of this post

Tristero responded to my thoughts on DRM, and I enjoyed our email exchange enough to want to reproduce it here (with Tristero’s permission). What follows is the original post copied from Hulaballoo, the section of my post that responded to it, and our email responses in turn. I think it ended up being a thoughtful dialog between an electronic media producer and consumer, two groups that have periodically been at each other’s throats since, oh, the day Napster first went live. In the end we largely agree, though differ on the nature of Kindle’s DRM. I don’t think any amount of additional back and forth will change that at the moment. But what’s life without a little unresolvable tension?

Totally, thoroughly inadequate. There simply are no conditions under which the Kindle model of book delivery is acceptable. No delivery system that permits a corporation or government to alter - never mind delete! - a purchased text can ever be anything than a civil libertarian’s worst nightmare. I don’t care if it’s 1984, the latest Harry Potter, or recipes. I don’t want a license to read the text. I need to own a copy of the text, just as I do with a printed book. Software that permits the alteration of purchased texts must be banned, with stiff penalties for infractions. End of story.

Don’t purchase the Kindle and all similar licensing devices. These things suck, big time, and always will.

Tristero recommended a boycott of the Kindle, writing “No delivery system that permits a corporation or government to alter - never mind delete! - a purchased text can ever be anything than a civil libertarian’s worse nightmare.” I agree it’s unacceptable for something you’ve purchased to be deleted by the company, but in this case it’s more about the odious nature of digital rights management (DRM) than censorship. Kindle’s books are locked down by DRM - internal security that prevents the files from being copied, shared or otherwise used in any way Amazon deems inappropriate. While it’s ostensibly about protecting intellectual property, in practice it tends more to be about companies putting their customers in walled gardens that prevent them from getting the most out of their content. The music industry has already been through this and decided the battle isn’t worth fighting. Not only does it tend to annoy consumers to have what they bought be so locked down, it causes an uproar when it actually gets enforced. Furthermore, it imposes what turn out to be legacy headaches for the companies themselves, as Microsoft and Yahoo unhappily discovered earlier this year. It’s why I refuse to by DRM’d music on principle. Sure, I could share Dent May’s fabulous album on a P2P network or torrent site now that I’ve downloaded it from Amazon’s very cool DRM-free download store. But do you know what I really want to do with it? I want to burn it to a CD to play on the ancient CD player in my living room, and burn another copy to play in my car, and copy it to my portable MP3 player to listen to at the fitness center, and copy it to my son’s Zune because he loves it as well, and take the CD I’ve burned for my car into work and rip it onto my computer there to listen to with headphones on if I’m in the mood, and….anything else I can think of. That’s why DRM is so objectionable to me - you can’t use what you buy the way you want. When you buy a Kindle, you buy a DRM model, and you take your chances. Sony has launched its own product that allows for both open and DRM’d file formats. If you don’t want to have to trust the maker of your reader, get the Sony and only buy books that don’t have it. DRM sucks, and consumers need to take what (if any) implementation of it is in any product they are considering - and set their expectations accordingly.

Now, if you want to say that the reason companies are doing this is because of the crazy Digital Millennium Copyright Act, and that we need to repeal it, I’ve got your back baby. I think companies use it as a convenient excuse to implement controls on their products that they might not otherwise. The DMCA is bad law, and that is sufficient to justify its repeal, but it also has been used to cover some pretty thoroughly consumer-unfriendly behavior. I’d like to see companies try to get away with some of this stuff without that crutch.

DRM is indeed odious, but that is a different issue, with a different set of vectors in play. The issue I address is that of corporate/government modification, repression and censorship of content. If you buy a locked up piece of music from iTunes, you can copy it to a cd for personal use and you have a permanent, unalterable copy, albeit restricted. That simply is not possible with the Kindle, where you can’t print out or archive a copy of the books you’ve licensed (notice: I did not say “your books”). So… even if you could copy it to another Kindle, some centralized distribution system could instantly alter the content of all copies, or delete it. DRM 1.0 - what you discuss - is a goddam pain in the neck and a legal infringement. DRM 2.0 - licenses tied to specific devices which retain the capability to alter or delete objectionable content without permission - is an open invitation to fascism.

And don’t think the right wouldn’t take full advantage of such “features” as the Kindle’s. Right now, Gingrich’s American history curriculum for high school, which literally writes out of existence all traces of liberalism, is in serious danger of being adopted by Texas. In education, as goes Texas goes the nation.

Please don’t misunderstand: I agree with you on DRM (but must point out that, as a composer of recorded music, I am left with unanswered questions regarding how I can make a living when my music gets used without compensation, as it has - not only with illegal downloads and pirated copies, but also stolen performances and uses in mixed media like tv). However, as serious as DRM is, imo, what Amazon just demonstrated is far, far, worse.

From my perspective restriction is restriction - the difference between what’s happening on the Kindle and the restrictions you describe on iTunes are of degree and not kind. I understand your point that the latter can’t be reached by Apple, but from a consumer standpoint it’s still frustrating to know that what I’ve paid for can be used in just about any way I want but is prevented from doing so by companies who want to micromanage my experience. (I avoid Apple in general because I don’t want Steve Jobs looking looking over my shoulder and saying “you don’t want to do that.”) As a customer, Kindle books being tied to a specific device is just a slightly more onerous version of iTunes restrictions.

I think the enlightened approach for content creators and providers is to crack down on widespread distribution channels like P2P and torrent sites, educate the public as much as possible on the legal issues involved, and trust that most people are fair minded and want to do the right thing. I mentioned Dent May’s album in my post - I found out about it from one of the many free MP3 sites I visit. I listen to lots of new music & new artists, and pay for almost none of it. Paradoxically, I’ve spent more on music since I started going to them than I had for at least ten years prior, maybe longer. There’s a business model in there - where consumers get access to tons of stuff for free and get to use it however they want, yet end up happily parting with more of their hard-earned cash. I wish publishers weren’t so jealous about making sure that no one anywhere ever uses their stuff in any way they don’t approve of that they create a lousy experience for the people they are trying to sell to.

I don’t think we disagree. This is a continuum, of course. For me, what Amazon did is at least a standard deviation to the right on the continuum in the trend towards fascism and so I treat it as a separate issue. But you’re not wrong.