Last week, Steve Jobs (CEO of Apple) published his Thoughts on Music on Apple's web site. Prompted by the calls for Apple to open up their iTunes/iPod FairPlay technology, Steve in response suggested that we should instead be focusing on pressuring the music companies to license their music without DRM. He sites that 90% of the world's music is still sold without any DRM on traditional CDs, and that protecting the other 10% doesn't do any good. Whether this is a PR move or not, I can't say, but he does make a good point.
One of the reasons that this article interested me so much is that part of my work is protecting digital textbooks from illegal redistribution. The most straightforward method for distributing books online would be in an unprotected PDF. This option is clearly the most convenient for the consumer. The major downside to this option is that it is also extremely easy to send the file to others. In addition, anyone can make printouts from a PDF file and redistribute or sell hard copies of the book. Since my brother's company is not a huge faceless multinational corporation, these activities actually hurt the business and its ability to continue operating.
So, we were given the choice of using some form of DRM to protect the digital textbooks. It turns out that there are not many truly secure and effective solutions for managed distribution of digital books that are available for purchase/license. In the end, however, we did decide to employ a DRM solution that encrypts the books and limits the number of installations you have for the special viewer that allows you to decrypt, read and print the textbooks.
There is still a gap in this protection, however. When you allow printing, a digital book can quite easily become a printed book, which can then be copied and peddled anywhere. We never considered disallowing printing; some of the books are upward of 500 pages and it is impractical to expect anyone to read that much off of their screen. Disabling printing would stop the printed piracy, but it would also have inconvenienced every legitimate user to an extreme level that would surely run the business into the ground.
The solution to this was to include a text watermark at the top and bottom of each page when printing that identifies the person who printed the material, along with a note that the material is exclusively for that person. This allows us to continue offering the print capability, but it also will make it a little harder for someone to print out the textbook and then sell it, since every page displays a copyright notice along with the person's name. While there are some people who will not care, we do have some faith in the general human population. :)
So, how does this relate back to Steve Job's thoughts on music? The most obvious connection is that both digital music and digital books are easily copied in the absence of DRM. The difference is that music is also available unprotected, and therefore protecting a portion of the available music does no good. In our situation, there are no unprotected books to purchase, so the DRM actually works. To me, this is the crucial difference: 90% of music still has no DRM, where 0% of our books have no DRM. I think that this underpins the crux of Steve's point: DRM on music is completely ineffective, so why bother?
I know there are folks completely opposed to DRM in any way, shape or form. On the other hand, many corporate interests would probably DRM everything if they could. I believe that there is a delicate balance of protection, convenience and effectiveness. What we will have to figure out in the ongoing digital revolution is where these elements intersect. DRM itself is not the problem, but rather its many poor implementations that over-emphasize protection and effectiveness at the cost of convenience. On the other hand, if effectiveness is below a certain threshold, you may as well not bother.
Maybe I'll just keep holding out for a resurgence of good old-fashioned honesty.
Crikey, you're responsible for DRM on my textbooks! For shame!! :-p
Can't you just print to a virtual printer that outputs PDF instead of paper?
I'm positive I have nothing to do with DRM on your textbooks. These are just one company's books, and they certainly are not used in any college courses.
As for printing to a PDF -- no, the special viewer software specially forbids this and will print blank pages if you do it. :)
Kevin wrote:
"I believe that there is a delicate balance of protection, convenience and effectiveness."
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"I believe that there is a delicate balance of protection, convenience, and effectiveness while always understanding that consumer rights trump copyrights."
I fixed that up for you.