4 ms·

> I treat all E-books purchased with DRM as rentals. Good for you. Nobody else outside of HN does.

by nodata 14y ago

raverbashing 14y ago
What's funny is this: Fine let's say it's not a rental, and forget about the DRM issue for a second. But what's your cost in keeping the data "alive"? I could copy it from machine to machine, maybe backup it on S3 (or similars), but all that has a cost (time, money, new reading devices, etc). A physical book has a cost as well: space, weight, etc. At some point, abandoning the book may be more cost effective, and even if digital books have a 'expire date' it looks like they may be cheaper in the long term
gioele 14y ago
> > I treat all E-books purchased with DRM as rentals. >Good for you. Nobody else outside of HN does. Lawyers and librarians also do. There are big discussions in those circles about the meaning of the verbs "to buy" and "to possess" as used by Amazon, Apple and other big DRM "retailers". It is not only about DRM. Libraries are realising that paying for access to a website of a publishing house is not exactly like paying to receive a copy of a published journal or magazine. Have a look at all the dark archives and to who is financing them. First it was an hacker problem, now it has spread to humanities, in five years the DRM will finally become a layperson problem. The first signs surfaced some years ago, when kids started complaining about the fact that their iPod could not be used to pass or share music while a cheaper Creative MP3 player could without a problem.
- dhimes 14y ago
  I had never heard of "dark archives." Is this what you mean? (from: http://www.osti.gov/ostiblog/dark-archives http://www.osti.gov/ostiblog/dark-archives) So, what is a dark archive? It is, simply put, an archive of information that is not used for public access. Most often it serves as a failsafe copy of a light archive, i.e. a publicly available version of the information, for use in disaster recovery operations. Dark archives need not be a fully operational copy of an information system, rather just the content behind the information system.
  - gioele 14y ago
    A dark archive is an archive that is not meant to be publicly accessible. As you said it is used to store information that must survive in case of disaster. But what is a disaster for a library? Yesterday it was a fire, today is a publisher going bankrupt and dismissing its online (paywalled) archive. A dark archive pays the fee to access various online resources and store them indefinitely, but without letting anyone access that information (well, except the archive admins). The legality of this? Dubious. The usefulness of this? High. As Portico.com puts it, «We chose to create a “dark” archive to focus our efforts on securing and preserving large volumes of content important to libraries and their users; however, it is not exclusively dark. Participating libraries experience the archive as a “light” or accessible archive in two ways: auditing the archive to ensure we are prepared to support eventual use and accessing of content that has been made available as the result of a “trigger event” or post-cancellation access claim. Unlike many ongoing preservation initiatives, Portico participants and their users experience direct customer support, should they ever need it.» But the devil is in the details. Who pays the fee for these dark archives? Do we trust them? Who is auditing what is happening behind the doors of the dark archives? Luckily there are FLOSS systems like LOCKSS and CLOCKSS that allow you to create your own dark archive. Few links: * http://news.jstor.org/news/2004.12/repositories.html http://news.jstor.org/news/2004.12/repositories.html * http://hul.harvard.edu/publications/ln1356/03.html http://hul.harvard.edu/publications/ln1356/03.html * http://www.clockss.org/clockss/FAQ http://www.clockss.org/clockss/FAQ * http://www.clockss.org/clockss/How_CLOCKSS_Works http://www.clockss.org/clockss/How_CLOCKSS_Works * http://www.portico.org/digital-preservation/the-archive-content-access http://www.portico.org/digital-preservation/the-archive-cont...
- mherdeg 14y ago
  Could you spell out what a "dark archive" is? The top few Google hits don't give me a precise sense of the thing.
acdha 14y ago
You should talk to more librarians. They're acutely aware of the problem and a number of people view public education on the subject as a professional obligation.
Silhouette 14y ago
Nobody else outside of HN [treats DRM'd e-book purchases as rentals]. Which is why the court hearing in cases like this should be short, and brutal to Amazon. Of course, they know that by being based in a different jurisdiction from the person they're screwing, such a case is unlikely to materialise. This is a problem with legal systems generally: low-value cases are rarely worth pushing through if you're not a lawyer, because it takes so long to figure out how to do it without that legal education that you've lost more than you ever stood to recover anyway. This is why consumer protection organisations with the weight of national governments behind them are necessary, but the idea hasn't caught up with the Internet yet.
raganwald 14y ago
> Nobody else outside of HN does I agree with this, provided that we adopt Joel Spolsky's definition of "Nobody:" Please understand that I'm talking about large trends here, and therefore when I say things like "nobody" I really mean "fewer than 10,000,000 people," and so on and so forth. http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/APIWar.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/APIWar.html That's the meaningful definition of nobody, and while it's entertaining for me to quibble that my ex-mother-in-law only "buys" light novels that she doesn't plan to re-read, your point is cogent.
- mfringel 14y ago
  I tend to use the phrase "Of course there are some people who do X, but we don't care about either of them."

> I treat all E-books purchased with DRM as rentals. Good for you. Nobody else outside of HN does.

by nodata 14y ago

> I treat all E-books purchased with DRM as rentals. Good for you. Nobody else outside of HN does.

What's funny is this: Fine let's say it's not a rental, and forget about the DRM issue for a second. But what's your cost in keeping the data "alive"? I could copy it from machine to machine, maybe backup it on S3 (or similars), but all that has a cost (time, money, new reading devices, etc). A physical book has a cost as well: space, weight, etc. At some point, abandoning the book may be more cost effective, and even if digital books have a 'expire date' it looks like they may be cheaper in the long term

gioele 14y ago

> > I treat all E-books purchased with DRM as rentals. >Good for you. Nobody else outside of HN does. Lawyers and librarians also do. There are big discussions in those circles about the meaning of the verbs "to buy" and "to possess" as used by Amazon, Apple and other big DRM "retailers". It is not only about DRM. Libraries are realising that paying for access to a website of a publishing house is not exactly like paying to receive a copy of a published journal or magazine. Have a look at all the dark archives and to who is financing them. First it was an hacker problem, now it has spread to humanities, in five years the DRM will finally become a layperson problem. The first signs surfaced some years ago, when kids started complaining about the fact that their iPod could not be used to pass or share music while a cheaper Creative MP3 player could without a problem.

dhimes 14y ago
I had never heard of "dark archives." Is this what you mean? (from: http://www.osti.gov/ostiblog/dark-archives http://www.osti.gov/ostiblog/dark-archives) So, what is a dark archive? It is, simply put, an archive of information that is not used for public access. Most often it serves as a failsafe copy of a light archive, i.e. a publicly available version of the information, for use in disaster recovery operations. Dark archives need not be a fully operational copy of an information system, rather just the content behind the information system.
- gioele 14y ago
  A dark archive is an archive that is not meant to be publicly accessible. As you said it is used to store information that must survive in case of disaster. But what is a disaster for a library? Yesterday it was a fire, today is a publisher going bankrupt and dismissing its online (paywalled) archive. A dark archive pays the fee to access various online resources and store them indefinitely, but without letting anyone access that information (well, except the archive admins). The legality of this? Dubious. The usefulness of this? High. As Portico.com puts it, «We chose to create a “dark” archive to focus our efforts on securing and preserving large volumes of content important to libraries and their users; however, it is not exclusively dark. Participating libraries experience the archive as a “light” or accessible archive in two ways: auditing the archive to ensure we are prepared to support eventual use and accessing of content that has been made available as the result of a “trigger event” or post-cancellation access claim. Unlike many ongoing preservation initiatives, Portico participants and their users experience direct customer support, should they ever need it.» But the devil is in the details. Who pays the fee for these dark archives? Do we trust them? Who is auditing what is happening behind the doors of the dark archives? Luckily there are FLOSS systems like LOCKSS and CLOCKSS that allow you to create your own dark archive. Few links: * http://news.jstor.org/news/2004.12/repositories.html http://news.jstor.org/news/2004.12/repositories.html * http://hul.harvard.edu/publications/ln1356/03.html http://hul.harvard.edu/publications/ln1356/03.html * http://www.clockss.org/clockss/FAQ http://www.clockss.org/clockss/FAQ * http://www.clockss.org/clockss/How_CLOCKSS_Works http://www.clockss.org/clockss/How_CLOCKSS_Works * http://www.portico.org/digital-preservation/the-archive-content-access http://www.portico.org/digital-preservation/the-archive-cont...
mherdeg 14y ago
Could you spell out what a "dark archive" is? The top few Google hits don't give me a precise sense of the thing.

acdha 14y ago

You should talk to more librarians. They're acutely aware of the problem and a number of people view public education on the subject as a professional obligation.

Silhouette 14y ago

Nobody else outside of HN [treats DRM'd e-book purchases as rentals]. Which is why the court hearing in cases like this should be short, and brutal to Amazon. Of course, they know that by being based in a different jurisdiction from the person they're screwing, such a case is unlikely to materialise. This is a problem with legal systems generally: low-value cases are rarely worth pushing through if you're not a lawyer, because it takes so long to figure out how to do it without that legal education that you've lost more than you ever stood to recover anyway. This is why consumer protection organisations with the weight of national governments behind them are necessary, but the idea hasn't caught up with the Internet yet.

raganwald 14y ago

> Nobody else outside of HN does I agree with this, provided that we adopt Joel Spolsky's definition of "Nobody:" Please understand that I'm talking about large trends here, and therefore when I say things like "nobody" I really mean "fewer than 10,000,000 people," and so on and so forth. http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/APIWar.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/APIWar.html That's the meaningful definition of nobody, and while it's entertaining for me to quibble that my ex-mother-in-law only "buys" light novels that she doesn't plan to re-read, your point is cogent.

mfringel 14y ago
I tend to use the phrase "Of course there are some people who do X, but we don't care about either of them."