10 ms·

Stallman: EBooks are "attacking our freedom"

35 points by noarchy 15y ago

nextparadigms 15y ago
I heard Amazon might be allowing epub books from authors/publishers starting this fall, but I doubt they'll be converting all their existing ebooks to ePub, which is a shame. And Stallman is right. You have fewer rights with ebooks than you do with real books.
- noarchy 15y ago
  I agree with him on those points. Where I disagree is when he suggests that taxes should be used to pay authors. It is difficult to justify that in the name of "freedom", imo.
  - Natsu 15y ago
    It's also somewhat dangerous. I can't remember the details, but there are places where you, effectively, can't give away your own work for free because the government is trying to protect you.
  - esrauch 15y ago
    It seems like this identical argument was made when the first tax-paid public libraries were opened, and yet very few people seem to be anti-public library today.
    - hnal943 15y ago
      Actually, I have a harder time finding people that still see libraries as necessary. The internet has pretty much met everyone's need for the information and entertainment the library provided, and then some.
      - noarchy 15y ago
        This probably depends on how arcane your research topic is. There are sources out there that have not been digitized, and this may require one to go hunting for some old, dusty tome. But this is all part of the evolution of how we get our information. More and more, I expect to see newer books go straight to digital formats, with dead-tree versions becoming a bit like vinyl records. Used book stores will sell things that are out of print, and things that were never converted into a digital format. Edit: I forgot to mention that some libraries already offer borrowing of eBooks. So some of them have seen the direction of things, and instead of resisting, are adapting.
      - scraplab 15y ago
        I completely disagree. Libraries, in the UK at least, are a fantastic resource for the poor and marginalised. To see our current government's attempts to shut them down is saddening.
    - deleted 15y ago
      [deleted]
  - davidw 15y ago
    "Our tax dollars are paying for WHAT?!" would, IMO, slowly (or even quickly) erode the list of "approved" topics and authors. And of course gaming the system would be worth a significant amount of money. Also: tax dollars are a per-country thing, whereas popularity is often global. It would make sense for countries to try and free-ride and get other countries' books for free and pay their authors nothing. For instance Australia could happily pay nothing to authors and let the US and UK pay them.
- Natsu 15y ago
  The sad thing is that we put a stop to this (and came up with first sale rights) when they tried all this crap with real books. Now that books are digital, I guess we need to do it again.
  - esrauch 15y ago
    I don't think that it is so simple; with physical books it is still illegal to make duplications, and with digital copies it is extremely difficult to allow people to transfer ownership of their copies without allowing for unlimited duplication and distribution that would destroy all motivation for anyone to purchase it to begin with. Second hand sale and lending of physical books would have been outlawed if it destroyed the whole book sale economy. I always see comments on here and on reddit that imply that people are too dumb to realize that ebooks are analogous to physical books, but that is a seriously absurd claim since they are so trivially similar; the difference in their legal treatment is rational and pragmatic not an evil conspiracy by publishers.
    - Natsu 15y ago
      That only works if one supposes that the only reason to pay authors is because one must do so. That said, any company which treats their customers like thieves will turn some fraction thereof into such.
- jeffreymcmanus 15y ago
  But from "fewer rights" it's a pretty big semantic leap to "attacking our freedom". Unless you're some kind of absolutist, which I understand Stallman to be.
  - aw3c2 15y ago
    I think the slow degrade of our freedom is meant. It is not an aggressive full-blown aggressive attack which we would probably oppose boldly, but a slowly creeping loss of rights and possibilities that people accept because "ah, I can live with THAT". It is hard to give a good title to that process so "attacking our freedom" sounds out of place.
    - hugh3 15y ago
      But you don't have any fewer rights than you did before! Want to buy a physical book and lend it to your friend? Go buy it! Don't want to buy an ebook under the terms and conditions which apply to ebooks? Don't buy any damn ebooks! I'd be out there complaining if actual capabilities were being taken away from me, but they aren't. Ebooks are a new class of product, and they work under slightly different rules from physical books.
      - aw3c2 15y ago
        The market might shift towards DRM'd ebooks. Just look at the PC gaming market. Most big games nowadays come with DRM.
- RexRollman 15y ago
  DRM is the problem here, not eBooks. eBooks themselves have a lot of potential, especially when you consider they don't ware down or degrade, they take no physical space, and that you have the option of changing things such as font size. And speaking as someone who has owned some of his books for decades, I worry about the long term implications of owning a collection of books encumbered with DRM.
  - scraplab 15y ago
    It's more than DRM though - there are no open ways of exporting annotations or bookmarks, on any of the major e-reading platforms. The Open Bookmarks project is an attempt to kick start this conversation, before it gets left behind. http://www.openbookmarks.org/ http://www.openbookmarks.org/
- bcaulf 15y ago
  "You have fewer rights with ebooks than you do with real books." You may have fewer legal rights but you have more options and control, as long as the ebooks are pirated! Pirated books can be obtained anonymously, copied freely, and they cannot be revoked. Just as with software and DVDs, the pirated version is actually better than the for-pay version.
StavrosK 15y ago
"ebooks" aren't "attacking our freedom". DRM and proprietary formats are. I'm publishing my Python tutorial on leanpub (a great idea which I plug whenever I can) and it's DRM free and available on many formats: http://leanpub.com/learn-python/ http://leanpub.com/learn-python/ You just buy the book once and you can download as many of the formats as you want, whenever you want, and if I update the book you get all subsequent versions for free. You can back it up and share it with your friends (maybe that's illegal, but you have my permission to do it with my book), etc.
- dfxm12 15y ago
  Can you resell it to a friend when you have no more use for it and they need it?
  - samlevine 15y ago
    Can you resell life insurance when you have no more use for it and they need it?
    - RexRollman 15y ago
      Bad example; life insurance is a service.
      - hugh3 15y ago
        Actually I think it could be a reasonable example in one sense: it gets us on to the question of "what is the difference between a good and a service, anyway"? A physical book is undeniably a good. But what about an eBook? An eBook is arguably a service -- you pay for the right to have a the words of the physical book show up on your little screen.
        bad_user 15y ago
        Then companies should use the proper wording - "rent" instead of "buy".
rmc 15y ago
I was pleasantly suprised to find that, for the Kindle Direct Publishing platform, DRM is optional. That's right. You don't need DRM to sell ebooks on the Kindle Shop.
- RexRollman 15y ago
  That makes me wonder why they use it on the free, public domain books that Amazon snarfed from Project Gutenburg.
  - aw3c2 15y ago
    Can you link to examples? Random guess would be that they are not sold by Amazon directly but by third-party merchants on Amazon.
    - RexRollman 15y ago
      You're right. It was third parties self publishing through Amazon, not Amazon themselves. Amazon itself was simply the mechanism.
- mvalle 15y ago
  I suspect this might be the work of Cory Docterow, I believe I heard him mentioning that the did a deal with Amazon where they would publish his books without DRM. But I might be wrong.
  - rmc 15y ago
    I suspect another reason is that many self published authors want to use Creative Commons licenced works for book covers, and (depending on the licence) you would not be able to use DRM on a CC book.
jeffreymcmanus 15y ago
The potential for ebooks to increase the distribution and reduce the cost of books, thereby increasing our freedom, never seems to be factored into this discussion. I wonder why?
- jackowayed 15y ago
  How does more utility == more freedom? I can lend physical books to friends, I can sell them when I'm done with them, I can buy them cheap from others who are done with them. That's freedom. And that's what the books I have the opportunity to buy on my Kindle lack (ability to lend some Kindle books in a lame way aside). No matter how many more books I have on the Kindle because ebooks are cheaper, the only freedom I have with them are to read them on devices that Amazon decides to support and to lend my whole Kindle to someone to let them read something.
  - jeffreymcmanus 15y ago
    You're missing my point, which is that more books and cheaper books equals more freedom. I'm not arguing against the notion that you should be able to do what you want with something you've purchased. But every business model ever conceived limits freedom in some way, and the echo-chamber argument that's put forth here consistently fails to take into account the fact that ebooks (and the business models that accompany them) have the potential to increase freedom by promoting reading. At the end of the day, nobody's preventing you from buying a paper book; if you want to lend the book out, buy the paper version. Simple.
  - NumberFiveAlive 15y ago
    Lending on the Kindle has worked pretty well for me. Can you clarify why it's lame? Also, can you name a device that Amazon doesn't support, apart from the Nook? I frequently read my Kindle content on the Kindle itself, my two PCs and my Mac, and my Droidx. I could also do it on any tablet (if I owned one), or my wife's iPhone. Not to mention, you can read any non-DRM content you want on the Kindle. And it's not that more utility == more freedom. It's that easier-to-self-publish is going to lower the barrier for people to create niche content by bypassing the big publishing houses. It's also going to create lower priced books overall, as well as more and better free content. I also personally think it's only a matter of time before the publishers realize what the music industry has mostly realized after a decade: DRM doesn't work. I think it will slowly phase itself out. Just a guess, though, YMMV.
Steko 15y ago
Ironically one of our best bets for efreedoms is from the efforts of authoritarian countries looking to protect local industries from US content behemoths.
siphr 15y ago
I have to disagree with RMS here. As an example of ebooks attacking our freedom, I agree with someone else that the problem is DRM and not the ebooks. Amazon, for example, lets the publisher choose whether they would like DRM in their ebooks or not. More so, the publishing platform lets the publisher to allow lending. The issue of Amazon wiping out 1984 is one of those things that has been done to death as a news article on the internet. Sure it was wrong, but from the copyright holder's point of view, it may be justified.
teyc 15y ago
I'd love to see Stallman and Andrea Dworkin on stage together.
thisrod 15y ago
Here is Stallman's proposal, in his own words: http://stallman.org/articles/internet-sharing-license.en.html http://stallman.org/articles/internet-sharing-license.en.htm... Australia, Canada, the US and the UK spend lots of public money on books, paintings, plays, concerts and broadcasts. Stallman wants to abstract over media, and pay according to law instead of ministerial taste. That makes sense to me. Remember that copying is only an issue if you publish. You can charge whatever you want for the privilege of seeing your unpublished work. If you'd lose money by publishing it, don't.

35 points by noarchy 15y ago

I heard Amazon might be allowing epub books from authors/publishers starting this fall, but I doubt they'll be converting all their existing ebooks to ePub, which is a shame. And Stallman is right. You have fewer rights with ebooks than you do with real books.

noarchy 15y ago
I agree with him on those points. Where I disagree is when he suggests that taxes should be used to pay authors. It is difficult to justify that in the name of "freedom", imo.
- Natsu 15y ago
  It's also somewhat dangerous. I can't remember the details, but there are places where you, effectively, can't give away your own work for free because the government is trying to protect you.
- esrauch 15y ago
  It seems like this identical argument was made when the first tax-paid public libraries were opened, and yet very few people seem to be anti-public library today.
  - hnal943 15y ago
    Actually, I have a harder time finding people that still see libraries as necessary. The internet has pretty much met everyone's need for the information and entertainment the library provided, and then some.
    - noarchy 15y ago
      This probably depends on how arcane your research topic is. There are sources out there that have not been digitized, and this may require one to go hunting for some old, dusty tome. But this is all part of the evolution of how we get our information. More and more, I expect to see newer books go straight to digital formats, with dead-tree versions becoming a bit like vinyl records. Used book stores will sell things that are out of print, and things that were never converted into a digital format. Edit: I forgot to mention that some libraries already offer borrowing of eBooks. So some of them have seen the direction of things, and instead of resisting, are adapting.
    - scraplab 15y ago
      I completely disagree. Libraries, in the UK at least, are a fantastic resource for the poor and marginalised. To see our current government's attempts to shut them down is saddening.
  - deleted 15y ago
    [deleted]
- davidw 15y ago
  "Our tax dollars are paying for WHAT?!" would, IMO, slowly (or even quickly) erode the list of "approved" topics and authors. And of course gaming the system would be worth a significant amount of money. Also: tax dollars are a per-country thing, whereas popularity is often global. It would make sense for countries to try and free-ride and get other countries' books for free and pay their authors nothing. For instance Australia could happily pay nothing to authors and let the US and UK pay them.
Natsu 15y ago
The sad thing is that we put a stop to this (and came up with first sale rights) when they tried all this crap with real books. Now that books are digital, I guess we need to do it again.
- esrauch 15y ago
  I don't think that it is so simple; with physical books it is still illegal to make duplications, and with digital copies it is extremely difficult to allow people to transfer ownership of their copies without allowing for unlimited duplication and distribution that would destroy all motivation for anyone to purchase it to begin with. Second hand sale and lending of physical books would have been outlawed if it destroyed the whole book sale economy. I always see comments on here and on reddit that imply that people are too dumb to realize that ebooks are analogous to physical books, but that is a seriously absurd claim since they are so trivially similar; the difference in their legal treatment is rational and pragmatic not an evil conspiracy by publishers.
  - Natsu 15y ago
    That only works if one supposes that the only reason to pay authors is because one must do so. That said, any company which treats their customers like thieves will turn some fraction thereof into such.
jeffreymcmanus 15y ago
But from "fewer rights" it's a pretty big semantic leap to "attacking our freedom". Unless you're some kind of absolutist, which I understand Stallman to be.
- aw3c2 15y ago
  I think the slow degrade of our freedom is meant. It is not an aggressive full-blown aggressive attack which we would probably oppose boldly, but a slowly creeping loss of rights and possibilities that people accept because "ah, I can live with THAT". It is hard to give a good title to that process so "attacking our freedom" sounds out of place.
  - hugh3 15y ago
    But you don't have any fewer rights than you did before! Want to buy a physical book and lend it to your friend? Go buy it! Don't want to buy an ebook under the terms and conditions which apply to ebooks? Don't buy any damn ebooks! I'd be out there complaining if actual capabilities were being taken away from me, but they aren't. Ebooks are a new class of product, and they work under slightly different rules from physical books.
    - aw3c2 15y ago
      The market might shift towards DRM'd ebooks. Just look at the PC gaming market. Most big games nowadays come with DRM.
RexRollman 15y ago
DRM is the problem here, not eBooks. eBooks themselves have a lot of potential, especially when you consider they don't ware down or degrade, they take no physical space, and that you have the option of changing things such as font size. And speaking as someone who has owned some of his books for decades, I worry about the long term implications of owning a collection of books encumbered with DRM.
- scraplab 15y ago
  It's more than DRM though - there are no open ways of exporting annotations or bookmarks, on any of the major e-reading platforms. The Open Bookmarks project is an attempt to kick start this conversation, before it gets left behind. http://www.openbookmarks.org/ http://www.openbookmarks.org/
bcaulf 15y ago
"You have fewer rights with ebooks than you do with real books." You may have fewer legal rights but you have more options and control, as long as the ebooks are pirated! Pirated books can be obtained anonymously, copied freely, and they cannot be revoked. Just as with software and DVDs, the pirated version is actually better than the for-pay version.

StavrosK 15y ago

"ebooks" aren't "attacking our freedom". DRM and proprietary formats are. I'm publishing my Python tutorial on leanpub (a great idea which I plug whenever I can) and it's DRM free and available on many formats: http://leanpub.com/learn-python/ http://leanpub.com/learn-python/ You just buy the book once and you can download as many of the formats as you want, whenever you want, and if I update the book you get all subsequent versions for free. You can back it up and share it with your friends (maybe that's illegal, but you have my permission to do it with my book), etc.

dfxm12 15y ago
Can you resell it to a friend when you have no more use for it and they need it?
- samlevine 15y ago
  Can you resell life insurance when you have no more use for it and they need it?
  - RexRollman 15y ago
    Bad example; life insurance is a service.
    - hugh3 15y ago
      Actually I think it could be a reasonable example in one sense: it gets us on to the question of "what is the difference between a good and a service, anyway"? A physical book is undeniably a good. But what about an eBook? An eBook is arguably a service -- you pay for the right to have a the words of the physical book show up on your little screen.
      - bad_user 15y ago
        Then companies should use the proper wording - "rent" instead of "buy".

rmc 15y ago

I was pleasantly suprised to find that, for the Kindle Direct Publishing platform, DRM is optional. That's right. You don't need DRM to sell ebooks on the Kindle Shop.

RexRollman 15y ago
That makes me wonder why they use it on the free, public domain books that Amazon snarfed from Project Gutenburg.
- aw3c2 15y ago
  Can you link to examples? Random guess would be that they are not sold by Amazon directly but by third-party merchants on Amazon.
  - RexRollman 15y ago
    You're right. It was third parties self publishing through Amazon, not Amazon themselves. Amazon itself was simply the mechanism.
mvalle 15y ago
I suspect this might be the work of Cory Docterow, I believe I heard him mentioning that the did a deal with Amazon where they would publish his books without DRM. But I might be wrong.
- rmc 15y ago
  I suspect another reason is that many self published authors want to use Creative Commons licenced works for book covers, and (depending on the licence) you would not be able to use DRM on a CC book.

jeffreymcmanus 15y ago

The potential for ebooks to increase the distribution and reduce the cost of books, thereby increasing our freedom, never seems to be factored into this discussion. I wonder why?

jackowayed 15y ago
How does more utility == more freedom? I can lend physical books to friends, I can sell them when I'm done with them, I can buy them cheap from others who are done with them. That's freedom. And that's what the books I have the opportunity to buy on my Kindle lack (ability to lend some Kindle books in a lame way aside). No matter how many more books I have on the Kindle because ebooks are cheaper, the only freedom I have with them are to read them on devices that Amazon decides to support and to lend my whole Kindle to someone to let them read something.
- jeffreymcmanus 15y ago
  You're missing my point, which is that more books and cheaper books equals more freedom. I'm not arguing against the notion that you should be able to do what you want with something you've purchased. But every business model ever conceived limits freedom in some way, and the echo-chamber argument that's put forth here consistently fails to take into account the fact that ebooks (and the business models that accompany them) have the potential to increase freedom by promoting reading. At the end of the day, nobody's preventing you from buying a paper book; if you want to lend the book out, buy the paper version. Simple.
- NumberFiveAlive 15y ago
  Lending on the Kindle has worked pretty well for me. Can you clarify why it's lame? Also, can you name a device that Amazon doesn't support, apart from the Nook? I frequently read my Kindle content on the Kindle itself, my two PCs and my Mac, and my Droidx. I could also do it on any tablet (if I owned one), or my wife's iPhone. Not to mention, you can read any non-DRM content you want on the Kindle. And it's not that more utility == more freedom. It's that easier-to-self-publish is going to lower the barrier for people to create niche content by bypassing the big publishing houses. It's also going to create lower priced books overall, as well as more and better free content. I also personally think it's only a matter of time before the publishers realize what the music industry has mostly realized after a decade: DRM doesn't work. I think it will slowly phase itself out. Just a guess, though, YMMV.

Steko 15y ago

Ironically one of our best bets for efreedoms is from the efforts of authoritarian countries looking to protect local industries from US content behemoths.

siphr 15y ago

I have to disagree with RMS here. As an example of ebooks attacking our freedom, I agree with someone else that the problem is DRM and not the ebooks. Amazon, for example, lets the publisher choose whether they would like DRM in their ebooks or not. More so, the publishing platform lets the publisher to allow lending. The issue of Amazon wiping out 1984 is one of those things that has been done to death as a news article on the internet. Sure it was wrong, but from the copyright holder's point of view, it may be justified.

teyc 15y ago

I'd love to see Stallman and Andrea Dworkin on stage together.

thisrod 15y ago

Here is Stallman's proposal, in his own words: http://stallman.org/articles/internet-sharing-license.en.html http://stallman.org/articles/internet-sharing-license.en.htm... Australia, Canada, the US and the UK spend lots of public money on books, paintings, plays, concerts and broadcasts. Stallman wants to abstract over media, and pay according to law instead of ministerial taste. That makes sense to me. Remember that copying is only an issue if you publish. You can charge whatever you want for the privilege of seeing your unpublished work. If you'd lose money by publishing it, don't.