(no subject)
Gosh golly gee-whiz: A big piece intoday's New York Times talks about how Amazon.com's more restrictive use of digital rights management (DRM) in its Kindle e-books is causing massive privacy, free speech, and other concerns. As the reporter points out:
D.R.M. has created a new dynamic between consumers and the vendors of digital media like books and movies. People do not so much own, but rent this media. And the rental agreement can be breached by the manufacturer at any time, sometime with little or no notice.
Does anyone remember Digital Video Express (DIVX)??? Someone over on my LiveJournal account mentioned this, and it brought back ugly memories of the early days of DVD. DVD was released in the U.S. in March 1997, but sales of players and discs were extremely poor. In December 1998, just in time for the holidays, Circuit City released DIVX -- "renting without the return." If you bought the DIVX DVD player, you could go to any Circuit City store (there were other, smaller chains involved, too) and get your movie on a "DIVX Silver" disc. The disc was time-limited, and would play for only 48 hours. (If you bought the "DVIX Gold" disc instead, you got the movie permenantly.) When you were done watching, just throw the disc away. DIVX failed for a lot of reasons: It wasn't rolled out throughout the home video industry (just at a very limited number of stores), was expensive (as were all DVD players until the industry decision to lower the cost of players and discs in late 1998), DIVX discs could not be played on anything other than a DIVX player; the viewing period was short; you had to maintain a DIVX account (over the phone, no less!); the catalog of films was very small; and the films were offered only in pan-and-scan with no extras.
At the time DIVX came out, there was a giant debate in the home video industry about whether the "benefit denial" system (like DIVX) should be the industry standard, or whether the "right of first sale" standard (the old "you buy it, it's yours to do with as you please") should prevail. Since DVD sales were moribund, the industry decided to go with the "right of first sale" model to encourage customers to buy DVD players and DVDs. That -- along with massive price drops (DVD player prices went from $750 in September 1998 to under $250 in November 1998, and continued to drop toward the $100 mark over the next year) -- led the DVD player to become the consumer electronic device adopted at a faster rather and by more people any other in American history.
There were privacy concerns with DIVX, too. Privacy experts worried that corporations would track which movies people were watching, manipulate the movies that were available to enhance corporate profits, limit rentals to people who rented many DIVX films (to keep costs low), and more. (Netflix, call your office.) These concerns weighed heavily on the minds of some consumers, who were already wondering whether they were going to junk extensive videotape collections in favor of an untested, untried, unfamiliar technology. They helped kill DIVX.
Now comes Kindle's DRM software. "As long as Amazon maintains control of the device it will have this ability to remove books and that means they will be tempted to use it or they will be forced to it," says one source in the story. But not only that! Amazon can use the DRM software, and the connection a consumer's Kindle device has to their network, to track what you read, how often you read it, whether you are reading it fast or slow, how you use your reading (are you copying text? are you bookmarking passages?), and more.
Among the concerns listed in the article:
D.R.M. has created a new dynamic between consumers and the vendors of digital media like books and movies. People do not so much own, but rent this media. And the rental agreement can be breached by the manufacturer at any time, sometime with little or no notice.
Does anyone remember Digital Video Express (DIVX)??? Someone over on my LiveJournal account mentioned this, and it brought back ugly memories of the early days of DVD. DVD was released in the U.S. in March 1997, but sales of players and discs were extremely poor. In December 1998, just in time for the holidays, Circuit City released DIVX -- "renting without the return." If you bought the DIVX DVD player, you could go to any Circuit City store (there were other, smaller chains involved, too) and get your movie on a "DIVX Silver" disc. The disc was time-limited, and would play for only 48 hours. (If you bought the "DVIX Gold" disc instead, you got the movie permenantly.) When you were done watching, just throw the disc away. DIVX failed for a lot of reasons: It wasn't rolled out throughout the home video industry (just at a very limited number of stores), was expensive (as were all DVD players until the industry decision to lower the cost of players and discs in late 1998), DIVX discs could not be played on anything other than a DIVX player; the viewing period was short; you had to maintain a DIVX account (over the phone, no less!); the catalog of films was very small; and the films were offered only in pan-and-scan with no extras.
At the time DIVX came out, there was a giant debate in the home video industry about whether the "benefit denial" system (like DIVX) should be the industry standard, or whether the "right of first sale" standard (the old "you buy it, it's yours to do with as you please") should prevail. Since DVD sales were moribund, the industry decided to go with the "right of first sale" model to encourage customers to buy DVD players and DVDs. That -- along with massive price drops (DVD player prices went from $750 in September 1998 to under $250 in November 1998, and continued to drop toward the $100 mark over the next year) -- led the DVD player to become the consumer electronic device adopted at a faster rather and by more people any other in American history.
There were privacy concerns with DIVX, too. Privacy experts worried that corporations would track which movies people were watching, manipulate the movies that were available to enhance corporate profits, limit rentals to people who rented many DIVX films (to keep costs low), and more. (Netflix, call your office.) These concerns weighed heavily on the minds of some consumers, who were already wondering whether they were going to junk extensive videotape collections in favor of an untested, untried, unfamiliar technology. They helped kill DIVX.
Now comes Kindle's DRM software. "As long as Amazon maintains control of the device it will have this ability to remove books and that means they will be tempted to use it or they will be forced to it," says one source in the story. But not only that! Amazon can use the DRM software, and the connection a consumer's Kindle device has to their network, to track what you read, how often you read it, whether you are reading it fast or slow, how you use your reading (are you copying text? are you bookmarking passages?), and more.
Among the concerns listed in the article:
- Government (anywhere in the world!) could decide that a particular work is politically damaging or embarrassing, and force Amazon to delete words, sentences, paragraphs, or even whole works. (Forget the subversion and freedom of samizdat! In the Kindle world, where Amazon controls everything, anyone with books or who is reading paper is clearly a subversive.)
- A judge in a libel or copyright suit could order Amazon to delete works from your Kindle. (This is a particular concern in countries where libel laws are permissive, such as the United Kingdom.)
- Because the Kindle software is proprietary, other companies must use it to sell through Amazon.com -- making Amazon the arbiter of what is sold and what is not. Amazon's model is Microsoft's model (and we all know just how well that is working!). Right now, Amazon seems not to care who uses Kindle software to turn their book, magazine, or newspaper into an e-text so long as you stick to Amazon's pricing scheme. That alone is worrisome, because Amazon is using Kindle as a loss-leader to build market share. No one wants Amazon to become the Wal-Mart of the e-book industry. But that's just what might happen: What if a foreign government becomes a large stockholder in Amazon and starts pressuring the company to refuse to accept e-texts it doesn't like? What if a right-winger gets some allies on the Amazon board (such as happened at Wal-Mart) and the company now refuses to carry books or magazines it feels are unChristian, indecent, or offensive? What if Amazon is pressured by regulators or a pressure-group or boycutt to not feature certain items (LGBTQ novels, nude photography, radical texts)....not really censor them, but make them difficult to find so they don't sell? (Gee, not like that has ever happened, huh?) Unlike a computer OS, there is no plug-n-play reason for Kindle to be so restrictive with its software -- except that Amazon wants to be a monopoly in this area.