> > Here's an interesting one for you. You decide to publish a special > printing of the book, "10000 Leagues Under The Sea" by Jules Vernes. > The text is not altered, but you produce a nice leather-bound volume. I > buy your book, cut the bindings, and scan the pages, one at a time, into > plain text (with no pagination or particular format). Is this legal? > You better believe it. The copyright expired long ago on that work. As > long as I don't copy your layout (pretty headings, etc), I am morally > and legally in the right. Now suppose you were an e-book publisher with > DRM. DRM now creates an artificial copyright because to extract the > text (to which you don't have exclusive rights), I have to break the > DRM, which is now illegal. This is the crux of the problem. DRM is > extending copyright to make it just as you described in your last > paragraph. This is wrong. The scary part is that with real books some > day disappearing, DRM-locked e-books could very well spell the end of > all public-domain texts. This potential for evil outweighs most > potential for good, I'm afraid. > > A sobering read (read it while you can): > http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html. You may think this is > a little extreme, but in the last 10 years, I've seen most of it start > to happen.
Furthermore, with the ethereal nature of digital formats (ie, they are constantly changing) it is entirely possible that DRM locked digital documents could be lost to society as a whole because the copyright owner bankrupts or something else and the copyrights are left in limbo. This has already happened with many software titles of the past and as DRM essentially requires a specific piece of software to access the data, it could and probably will (maybe already has) happen with creative works in the future. DRM is just an unnecessary extra lock. Copyright is enough legal protection. DRM is just a technological stopgap with very real downsides and little in the way of positive upsides. Either you are legally allowed to copy something, or you are not. DRM does not change that, it just seeks to give the whole system a little more power in the digital age. The problem, as many have pointed out, is that DRM can be used for some very nefarious purposes. Josh ____________________ BYU Unix Users Group http://uug.byu.edu/ ___________________________________________________________________ List Info: http://uug.byu.edu/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/uug-list
