The Electronic Frontier Foundation has produced a very handy checklist to ask yourself how much reading rights you are giving away when accepting DRM restrictions on the new generation of eBooks.
Here’s the intro:
“After several years of false starts, the universe of digital books seems at last poised to expand dramatically. Readers should view this expansion with both excitement and wariness. Excitement because digital books could revolutionize reading, making more books more findable and more accessible to more people in more ways than ever before. Wariness because the various entities that will help make this digital book revolution possible may not always respect the rights and expectations that readers, authors, booksellers and librarians have built up, and defended, over generations of experience with physical books.
As new digital book tools and services roll out, we need to be able to evaluate not only the cool features they offer, but also whether they extend (or hamper) our rights and expectations.”
March 4th, 2010 at 5:33 pm
For traditional books, a library allows anyone to take a book on loan and read it.
The equivalent for a library in the internet age is bit torrent, in its various implementations, distributing not only books but also videos to those interested in reading/watching them.
March 5th, 2010 at 12:34 pm
See also this funny illustration by Brad Colbow who makes the point quite poignantly
Why DRM Doesn’t Work
www.bradcolbow.com/archive.php/?p=205