These are all weaknesses of the Kindle model, which has the seller in more or less total control of your ebooks: They're either stored on a device that Amazon always has access to, or their stored on Amazon's server. [Aside: Suddenly I wonder if the Kindle ToS amount to you leasing the device. But I digress.]
Ebooks that aren't stored in that way are much more amenable to lending or transfer. But there's just not a real mapping; the metaphors don't really apply. (Weakness of metaphorical reasoning.) The nature of ebooks is such that without some kind of technological infrastructure (which is never going to be anything as basic or essential as paper & ink) you just can't truly transfer ebooks -- rather, you duplicate it. This is the basic problem that nobody on the commercial side of things is dealing with: The nature of new media is that they are duplicable in ways that old media weren't. DRM is a bandaid. We're certainly not going to roll back the new media (that's just not going to happen). So the choice is that we change the way we think about creative product, or we change the way we think about the control of creative product. The nature of the new media is such that to effectively control it, we'll have to fundamentally alter our basic freedoms. Think about it: Really effective DRM will require such a fine degree of control over our digital actions that it will permeate all our activities. Somebody or something is going to have visibility into everything we do. (Let's put aside for the moment the observation that that's inevitable anyway.) Basically, everything will become product. Micropayments (though larger than originall envisioned) will become viable, and will end up pervading our lives. We'd end up like characters in a P K Dick novel, arguing with the door to our apartment about whether it should let us in even though we can't pay the door-opening fee. I suspect things will continue down that path for a while; it may take a while, but it seems clear to me that path is non-viable in terms of international competitiveness, though I suspect it will take a generation or so to play out. This kind of regime requires infrastructure, and it also really requires a certain disconnect from the natural world before you can swallow it without resistence. So I imagine that some emerging nations will be less likely to adopt. China might find it easy to enforce; India less easy; Nigeria (who I'd bet will be making internationally-marketed films in ten years) much less so. On Sat, Jul 18, 2009 at 12:06 AM, Alicia Henn <[email protected]>wrote: > > Amazon remotely deleted purchased copies of Orwell's works from > Kindles after the copyright owner complained. Ah, the irony! > > “It illustrates how few rights you have when you buy an e-book from > Amazon,” said Bruce Schneier, chief security technology officer for > British Telecom and an expert on computer security and commerce. “As a > Kindle owner, I’m frustrated. I can’t lend people books and I can’t > sell books that I’ve already read, and now it turns out that I can’t > even count on still having my books tomorrow.” > > > http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/18/technology/companies/18amazon.html?_r=1&hp > > Alicia > > > -- eric scoles ([email protected]) --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "R-SPEC: The Rochester Speculative Literature Association" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/r-spec?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
