Fairy Leaves: DRM and Trust
Feb. 3rd, 2010 01:17 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
andygatesI have a dilemma: I want to spend money and I don't know how.
The problem is good old DRM. Ebooks outside the Kindleverse* are mostly EPUBs with optional DRM from Adobe Digital Editions (ADE). As DRM goes, this is pretty sophisticated, allowing you to register multiple devices to your ADE ID and handling device recovery and even some lending (gasp!).
But the key to my book is still in the hands of Adobe. And that means that there's a trust issue: Will Adobe honour that key in perpetuity? Hell, will Adobe exist in perpetuity?
I'm reminded, always, of the Wal-Mart music DRM failure a couple of years ago: The ongoing cost of running a DRM service for some old music site isn't trivial and they cancelled it; users' music died on its legs. Who is to say that the same won't apply to Adobe, or to the conglomerate that buys Adobe in five years' time, or the standards refresh that makes ADE hilarious legacy tech in ten?
And how about corporate spats? What if Adobe disagree with, say, Amazon over some deal and they stop honoring the keys (think of the recent Macmillan spat and escalate it)? Or if currently unwritten legislation requires them to do so (imagine a corporate merger and the unintended consequences of an antitrust ruling)? What about a book vendor that goes out of business? Or is declared seditious?
There's no way ADE can kill the book on a device - it's not got the Kindle Killswitch. In fact it's pretty darn good as DRM goes. It communicates only infrequently, when move or copy a book, so the danger is at refresh time. Imagine five years from now, new reader: You log onto ADE to get a "service unavailable" message and your books are so much junk. Or a new PC: You install ADE, log on and... your books are so much junk. It's like discovering that bookworm has eaten the pages of everything on your bookshelf.
This untrustworthy hint of the ephemeral -- the threat, however small, that the pages of an ebook will turn into so much dust ten years from now -- that makes me unwilling to spend money.
Books last. Cracked downloads last too.
That's why the industry needs to sort this: there needs to be a non-profit universal key service, supported by all actors, used by all actors, so that when a private service dies it goes into escrow heaven there to serve ad perpetuum. It needs to be as universal and as infrastructural as DNS.
Until then, DRM'd ebooks are a rental with an uncertain return date.
* Inside the Kindleverse the DRM is all handled by Amazon: the trust issue is the same, it's just more contained - like Apple, the whole shebang of content, reader and DRM is handled by one organization. It makes things slick and easy (and therefore popular) but doesn't addresss my fears.
The problem is good old DRM. Ebooks outside the Kindleverse* are mostly EPUBs with optional DRM from Adobe Digital Editions (ADE). As DRM goes, this is pretty sophisticated, allowing you to register multiple devices to your ADE ID and handling device recovery and even some lending (gasp!).
But the key to my book is still in the hands of Adobe. And that means that there's a trust issue: Will Adobe honour that key in perpetuity? Hell, will Adobe exist in perpetuity?
I'm reminded, always, of the Wal-Mart music DRM failure a couple of years ago: The ongoing cost of running a DRM service for some old music site isn't trivial and they cancelled it; users' music died on its legs. Who is to say that the same won't apply to Adobe, or to the conglomerate that buys Adobe in five years' time, or the standards refresh that makes ADE hilarious legacy tech in ten?
And how about corporate spats? What if Adobe disagree with, say, Amazon over some deal and they stop honoring the keys (think of the recent Macmillan spat and escalate it)? Or if currently unwritten legislation requires them to do so (imagine a corporate merger and the unintended consequences of an antitrust ruling)? What about a book vendor that goes out of business? Or is declared seditious?
There's no way ADE can kill the book on a device - it's not got the Kindle Killswitch. In fact it's pretty darn good as DRM goes. It communicates only infrequently, when move or copy a book, so the danger is at refresh time. Imagine five years from now, new reader: You log onto ADE to get a "service unavailable" message and your books are so much junk. Or a new PC: You install ADE, log on and... your books are so much junk. It's like discovering that bookworm has eaten the pages of everything on your bookshelf.
This untrustworthy hint of the ephemeral -- the threat, however small, that the pages of an ebook will turn into so much dust ten years from now -- that makes me unwilling to spend money.
Books last. Cracked downloads last too.
That's why the industry needs to sort this: there needs to be a non-profit universal key service, supported by all actors, used by all actors, so that when a private service dies it goes into escrow heaven there to serve ad perpetuum. It needs to be as universal and as infrastructural as DNS.
Until then, DRM'd ebooks are a rental with an uncertain return date.
* Inside the Kindleverse the DRM is all handled by Amazon: the trust issue is the same, it's just more contained - like Apple, the whole shebang of content, reader and DRM is handled by one organization. It makes things slick and easy (and therefore popular) but doesn't addresss my fears.
