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Digital Textbook Model of Failure: Digital Rights Management
August 26, 2009 | Tagged Free Digital Textbook Initiative | 2 Comments
Few industries are as dumb as music publishers and the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA). Of course, they don’t see themselves this way, but their love affair with Digital Rights Management (DRM) created more damage to their industry than they admit and provided competitors both time and incentive to create better models. This is what happens when a disruptive innovation (digital music in this case) meets an industry that doesn’t want to change.
While I’m writing about the now defunct DRM on digital music, remember, we’re really talking about the textbook publishing industry and their intention of putting DRM on digital textbooks.
Digital Rights Management is a copyright scheme used to lock-up digital media to keep copyright pirates from stealing music. While DRM has done little to keep pirates from stealing content, it has been very successful in treating legitimate users as criminals.
A good primer to the DRM debate may be found at the Electronic Freedom Foundation’s site. Their article, The Customer Is Always Wrong: A User’s Guide to DRM in Online Music, while being written before major music publishers abandoned DRM, still outlines a variety of arguments against restricting users’ rights.
By weaving DRM within digital music, legitimate music buyers get less for their money than they did by purchasing CDs. In the old world, I could purchase a new CD for $10 or I could download the album from iTunes for the same price. The difference, though, was staggering. By owning the physical CD, I could digitally encode the music in any music library, including iTunes, at any level of quality I choose. However, the iTunes downloads, which were DRM-encoded, contained many restrictions: 1) the music was lower in quality; 2) the music format was Apple’s AAC format which was not transferable to other devices; and 3) the DRM scheme restricted my music to five devices.
Worse, though, was the marriage made between my personal music library and Apple’s DRM server. You see, each time I wished to transfer my music to a new computer or device, I had to verify that I owned the songs. While Apple’s DRM server confirmed my ownership, should Apple’s server stop working, my library would be crippled.
Of course, you know the “rest of the story.” Before long, many music stores began shutting down because they weren’t profitable. When they eventually shut down their DRM servers, people’s legitimately purchased music will go away. Those of us who purchased CDs aren’t affected, but those that invested in the digital medium will be forced to purchase the White Album again.
Now, one year after Apple stopped selling DRM-encoded music, the industry has settled into a DRM-free environment. I control the music I purchase online. Unfortunately, should Apple’s server stop working, several dozen albums in my library will cease to play.
I fear for the digital textbook movement. Digital Rights Management treats legitimate purchasers as criminals by limiting their access to their content. If I buy a hard copy of Orwell’s 1984, I can do whatever I wish with it, including giving it away, loaning it to a friend, or selling it at a garage sale. DRM eliminates these options. Worse, if you had purchased 1984 last June from Amazon for your Kindle, you would have woken up on July 17th and noticed that Amazon had remotely erased the book from your eReader.
If we really want to change paradigms to encourage the public to embrace digital resources, we’ll need to provide them the same rights they would have if they had purchased a hard copy. DRM doesn’t deter copyright pirates. If publishers are concerned about legitimate users violating the law, they could put a digital watermark on their files that would identify the original purchaser, which is Apple’s new model. This would allow publishers to track ownership should the file end up on P2P server. Digital Rights Management is a failed model, one that textbook publishers should avoid.
Comments
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oooh ! I have been just WAITING to hear what you had to say about this !
let me first respond to this well repeated argument…
“If I buy a hard copy of Orwell’s 1984, I can do whatever I wish with it, including giving it away, loaning it to a friend, or selling it at a garage sale.”
yes – but that is ONE COPY. When it is digital, if you can ‘give’ that to someone, THAT person can give it to someone else and suddenly you find yourself in Metalica’s shoes – as a content creator, with your demographic as the distributor – and your demographic is largely ‘we have little money and we fancy being anarchist anyway’ – the new album sales numbers fail to even come close to the ‘before digital’ release…
And this is suddenly a big mess. How to AVOID that is what Amazon did and has done – you really do not have a copy, it is made available to you – yes, this can be beaten, but that is because it is not designed to be unbeatable.
In a perfect textbook world, I could see that i rent a eBook for that semester and it expires – i can see that if i forget my eReader, lose my eReader and break my eReader, with a new one – i simply log back into the system and everything is right with my world, just like i can log into my Google Account and get my eMail, Google Docs, post on my blog – all any any computer.
this statement – well, i can’t “completely” agree with this statement…
“we’ll need to provide them the same rights they would have if they had purchased a hard copy.”
Well, if the students are provided a free eBook reader (because it is cheaper for the school system) – like we turn the books back in at the end of the year for the next years class, the Book reader content must expire somehow.
As for the delusional of Watermarking …
Watermarking can’t replace nor is it somehow “better” than DRM dues to it is not a type of “access control;” it is a simple identification technology. Watermarking simply encode purchase information into a digital file (like your name, purchase date, etc.), but it differs from DRM in that it isn’t designed to directly enforce how or who uses content.
Without a tie to some method to remove the unauthorized content, you are going to have a LOT of textbook content producers WISHING Arnold asked Amazon to manage the distribution. Complain as everyone did, at least Amazon had a method in place that worked.
I just hope the distribution folks have thought that part through !
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