Blogger “Andy” on AgnosticMaybe has posted the following proposed E-Book User’s Bill of Rights. Do you subscribe to it?
Richard Curtis

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The eBook User’s Bill of Rights

Every eBook user should have the following rights:

* the right to use eBooks under guidelines that favor access over proprietary limitations
* the right to access eBooks on any technological platform, including the hardware and software the user chooses
* the right to annotate, quote passages, print, and share eBook content within the spirit of fair use and copyright
* the right of the first-sale doctrine extended to digital content, allowing the eBook owner the right to retain, archive, share, and re-sell purchased eBooks

I believe in the free market of information and ideas.

I believe that authors, writers, and publishers can flourish when their works are readily available on the widest range of media. I believe that authors, writers, and publishers can thrive when readers are given the maximum amount of freedom to access, annotate, and share with other readers, helping this content find new audiences and markets. I believe that eBook purchasers should enjoy the rights of the first-sale doctrine because eBooks are part of the greater cultural cornerstone of literacy, education, and information access.

Digital Rights Management (DRM), like a tariff, acts as a mechanism to inhibit this free exchange of ideas, literature, and information. Likewise, the current licensing arrangements mean that readers never possess ultimate control over their own personal reading material. These are not acceptable conditions for eBooks.

I am a reader. As a customer, I am entitled to be treated with respect and not as a potential criminal. As a consumer, I am entitled to make my own decisions about the eBooks that I buy or borrow.

I am concerned about the future of access to literature and information in eBooks. I ask readers, authors, publishers, retailers, librarians, software developers, and device manufacturers to support these eBook users’ rights.
These rights are yours. Now it is your turn to take a stand. To help spread the word, copy this entire post, add your own comments, remix it, and distribute it to others. Blog it, Tweet it (#ebookrights), Facebook it, email it, and post it on a telephone pole.

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The ability of the human mind to rationalize is extraordinary.  Take piracy.  Among the many comments we have received in response to our postings on the subject, we have heard every rationalization under the sun, ranging from “I didn’t know it was copyrighted” to “I don’t know what copyright is” to “DRM sucks” to “The e-book wasn’t available on legitimate retail sites” to “Information wants to be free” to “I’m not reselling, just sharing with friends” to “The percentage of pirated books is an insignificant fraction of sales through legitimate channels” etc. etc.

Piracy is something that other people do. When we do it there’s always a good excuse.  When other people do it, it’s as heinous as grand theft auto.

Clearly, there is a disconnect between the phenomenon of rampant piracy and the scarcity of perpetrators, and the reason seems to be semantic. If we can develop better definitions we may be able to develop better solutions.

Towards that end we offer the following categories of pirate:

1. The Innocent

Young children, technologically inexperienced individuals and others who know nothing about copyright law or Internet etiquette and don’t realize they may be stealing when they download music or e-books.  People who simply don’t know better.

2.The Ignorant

These are downloaders who know enough about copyright  law to understand the difference between right and wrong, but choose to ignore or flout it.

Though many who fall into this category are young, the classification includes adults, some of whom are highly educated – business people, computer engineers and other professionals who should know better.

We’re giving Innocents/Ignorants the benefit of the doubt by describing their acts of downloading as “inadvertent” or “improper” rather than “illegal.” But if nothing else they must be aware of the legal principle that ignorance of the law is no excuse. If an aggrieved publisher decides to sue you for illegally downloading e-books – as has been done in the music and movie fields – your case will not be automatically dismissed because you didn’t know it was against the law.

3. The Customer

These are people who paid for one version of a book and feel entitled to acquire other versions without paying for them. A good example is the case of a consumer who buys a hardcover edition of a bestselling novel and feels justified in downloading a pirated e-book because the publisher’s legitimate e-book version has not yet been released. No less a personage than the New York Times‘s own ethical arbiter felt that a customer has the right to do this. (See NY Times Ethicist Condones Ripping Off E-Books). In other cases, consumers impatient with DRM restrictions will download a ripped off version of a file instead of paying for it and dealing with customer support.

4. The Philosopher

The Internet era has spawned a generation possessing a strong sense of entitlement, including entitlement to online content whether is is copyright-protected or not. Some members of this generation have rationalized their sense of entitlement and promote it not merely as an abstract concept but as a template for action. (See When Did “Free” Become a Four Letter Word?)

These philosophers collectively march under the banner “Information Wants To Be Free.” Others, taking Robin Hood as their role model, deliberately and defiantly hack protected files or download pirated content to get around the law, asserting their right to liberate it from capitalist exploiters.

What these philosopher-pirates don’t seem to understand is that, in capitalism as in Newtonian physics, for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. If you’re getting something free, someone else is paying for it.

5. The Recreational Thief

For some people acquiring and sharing files is more of a sport than a business or criminal activity. Since filesharing is technically not illegal, it’s a way of belonging to a community.  Recreational pirates gain acceptance from peers and notoriety from sharing files.  Some forums even have a “thank you” module where other members encourage sharing,. Thank-You’s are displayed like battle ribbons by prolific uploaders.

Another form of recreational pirating is file-hoarding.  Like hoarders of material things, digital hoarders collect and save terabytes of pirated files. Their motivation? “Hey, you never know when you’ll need 10,000 fonts.”

6. The Facilitator

This type is analogous to the owner of a head shop that sells bongs, cigarette papers and drug paraphernalia – everything but the drugs themselves – and thus skirt the law. Similarly, many IT professionals knowingly link to pirated material for a variety of reasons that fall short of hardcore criminality.

A common example are webmasters seeking to boost traffic for their websites.  They attract traffic from customers looking for stolen files or seeking links to hot pirate sites. Savvy webmasters load up on as many ads as possible to cash in on that traffic.  They are well versed in the ways of piracy but aren’t active in file sharing.

7. The Professional

Professional pirates don’t merely steal and sell software.  They use pirated files as bait to smuggle phishing software into the computers of their victims. These programs  then steal personal information like credit card numbers and bank account logins. Some of these pirates have been linked to organized crime groups. They employ software hackers to crack DRM, program key generators and penetrate security systems.

You can always tell who the professional pirates are: they’re the only ones who don’t mind being called pirates.

Like any community, the ecology of piracy is complex and interwoven, but it’s clear from a glance that the activities of innocents and amateurs enable the sharks to feast on stolen material and prey on the public.  By defining each type we can immediately see what sanctions are in order -  who needs a tap on the wrists, who needs to be educated and who needs to be tried in civil or criminal court.

In future postings we’ll examine remedies and solutions for each type of transgression.

Richard Curtis and Anthony Damasco

The word is “Greed”, says author Tony Woodlief in the Wall Street Journal.

Is that the right word? We can agree on it as a working hypothesis, but in truth the issues are far too complicated for such oversimplification, and unfortunately they’re about to become even more complicated. Fiendishly, maybe even insolubly, complicated.

The High Cost of Permissions

In a cautionary anecdote Woodlief voices a complaint about the high cost of clearing permissions: “When I asked to use a single line by songwriter Joe Henry, for example, his record label’s parent company demanded $150 for every 7,500 copies of my book. Assuming I sell enough books to earn back my modest advance, this amounts to roughly 1.5% of my earnings, all for quoting eight words from one of Mr. Henry’s songs.” Woodlief spurned the record company’s price and elected instead to use a quote from a public domain source. In a masterfully understated phrase, he muses “it’s not clear that his interests —or theirs—are being served here.”

The debate over permissions has gone on for as long as copyright protection was established by statute, including the American Constitution, centuries ago. These laws attempt to navigate the tension – or perhaps conflict is a better word – between rewarding content creators for their works and satisfying the public’s need to benefit from those creations. Woodlief phrases it cogently: “While we want to give artists incentives, we don’t want the costs to be so high that art appreciation—a difficult cultural attribute to re-establish once it is lost —declines.”

Publishers and agents daily walk this tightrope, setting prices for licenses for properties under their control that recognize the licensor’s intentions and budget on the one hand and the value of the artist’s work on the other.  To the seller the price may seem reasonable, to the buyer exorbitant. The battle is never-ending.  Except that in the Digital Era the battle is intolerable and will simply have to stop.

Permissions clearance a disaster in the Digital Age

The reason it has to stop is the emerging species called Enhanced E-Books. Unlike simple print anthologies of an earlier, quainter century (the 20th), enhanced e-books draw on film, video, music, photographs, and other art forms. For which reason they are also known as “vooks” in contemporary parlance, a hybrid of “videos” and “books”. (See If They Asked Me I Could Write a…Vook?)

So? What’s the problem?  For a recent webinar on the subject I stated it this way: “The challenge of clearing rights for enhanced e-books is so dauntingly complex that nothing less than an overhaul of the current antiquated system is necessary if enhanced e-books are not to die aborning.”

“Though an enhanced e-book would appear to be a digital product, in fact most of the processes necessary to produce it rely on the traditional and extremely tedious tasks of clearing rights and permissions, something publishers and agents have been doing for a century. For nothing more than a single image you will have to track down the credit line for the photographer or artist to give proper attribution; then you need to ascertain the source – where was it originally published? Then you must examine the contract to learn the terms by which the image was acquired. One time use only? Or did the purchaser buy rights in perpetuity? If the latter, you need to locate the purchaser to negotiate permission. If you’re using the image worldwide you need to clear permission with copyright owners in each territory (North American, UK, foreign language publishers, etc.

“And that’s for one image. If you use dozens, plus copyrighted texts, plus YouTube videos, plus movie clips, music and other protected works, the clearance process can be so daunting as to be not worth it.”

The solution?  Become a Renaissance man

“There’s gotta be a better way,” I concluded.

Is there? Bartering isn’t practical, though Woodlief actually tried it. “Will you,” he asked some poet friends, “give me a poem in return for a book and dinner?” Some of them agreed, and their poems ended up in his book.

Marc Aronson took a stab at a more realistic approach in a recent NY Times op-ed. “For e-books, the new model would look something like this: Instead of paying permission fees upfront based on estimated print runs, book creators would pay based on a periodic accounting of downloads… If rights holders were compensated for actual downloads, there would be a perfect fit. The better a book did, the more the original rights holder would be paid.”

Unfortunately, Aronson doesn’t address how the book’s creator would divide payments among movie companies, music composers, photographers, videographers, and garden variety authors.  Nor does he venture into the question of how to place comparative values on a one paragraph quote from an obscure journal versus a three minute clip from a blockbuster movie versus a top-of-the-charts hit song. Nor does he tell us how a humble little vookmaker will be able to afford the permissions cost of all that imported content when even a few minutes of music will bust his budget.

In all likelihood Aronson didn’t venture into this territory because it’s radioactive. It’s hard to imagine how we will come up with a solution in the foreseeable future, even though the success of this exciting new genre desperately depends on it. Unless…

Some years ago as the Digital Age dawned I wrote a piece called Author? What’s an Author? suggesting that the author of tomorrow would have to become more like the breed of filmmaker called “auteur” who writes, produces, directs, edits and scores his or her own movies.

“The day is coming—and much sooner than you may think—when authors will no longer be able to define themselves simply as creators of literary works,” I wrote. “As electronic technology hurtles too fast for even futurists to keep up with, a generation of readers is emerging that will not accept text unless it is interactively married to other media. The twenty-first century’s definition of ‘author’ will be as far from today’s definition as you are from the town scribe of yore.”

In short, if you possess the filmmaking gifts of a Hitchcock, the song-writing skills of Rogers and Hammerstein and the photographic genius of a Cartier-Bresson, and – oh yes – if you’re as good a writer as Tolstoy, you’ll be able to create your own enhanced e-books without laying out a dime for permissions. You’ll be nominated for a Vookie, which is undoubtedly what they will call the award given out to auteurs of vooks.  Just make sure you have your speech ready if you win.

Richard Curtis

Every Blogger owes a debt of gratitude to newspapers and magazines. This posting relies on original research and reporting performed by the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal.

Mobipocket is a cross-platform e-book format developed by a French team at the dawn of the e-book revolution.  It was the earliest attempt to make a one-size-fits-all program and for years the most successful.  Then Amazon acquired it and reversed its polarity, turning it from a universal format to an exclusive closed system. That system became the Kindle. E-book publishers wanting to convert files for the Kindle use a variant of Mobi called eBookBase.

According to Diesel founders Scott Redford and Kelley Allen. you can kiss your eBookBase goodbye. “Last month,” they report on the Diesel website, ” eBookBase informed their client base that they had no current or future intentions of renewing their contracts with the Agency Five (Hachette, HarperCollins, Macmillan, Penguin and Simon & Schuster) and that they were pulling all A5 books off our site.”

Redford and Allen have looked at some other examples of a fading MobiPocket presence and wonder Are We Witnessing the Slow, Agonizing Death of Mobipocket?

It makes sense to us. A whole new suite of tools has burgeoned since the program was introduced and it just may be that the time has come to deep-six Mobi. Au revoir, cher ami!

Richard Curtis

Once again it’s time to play You Be the Agent.

Today’s question is, How much is one line of poetry worth? Not a lot, you say? Suppose you represented the Robert Frost estate and someone requested permission to use the line “And miles to go before I sleep” in an anthology. Still think it’s worth nothing?

That’s the kind of question that comes up daily in every literary agency. But with the introduction of digital technology, decisions that were once fairly cut and dried have become head-spinningly complex. Marc Aronson, in an op-ed piece published in the New York Times, stated the issue cogently: “In order for electronic books to live up to their billing, we have to fix a system that is broken: getting permission to use copyrighted material in new work. Either we change the way we deal with copyrights — or works of nonfiction in a multimedia world will become ever more dull and disappointing.”

What does Aronson mean? “Given that permission costs are already out of control for old-fashioned print,” he writes, “it’s fair to expect that they will rise even higher with e-books. After all, digital books will be in print forever (we assume); they can be downloaded, copied, shared and maybe even translated. We’ve all heard about the multimedia potential of the iPad, but how much will writers be charged for film clips and audio? Rights holders will demand a hefty premium for use in digital books — if they make their materials available in that format at all.”

Aronson thinks it’s high time for a new permissions model grounded in the realities of the digital paradigm. “Instead of paying permission fees upfront based on estimated print runs, book creators would pay based on a periodic accounting of downloads.” Though accounting for sales under this system might at first seem daunting, the micropayment management such as Paypal is already commonplace.
Aronson is onto something. Expect to hear more about it.

Richard Curtis

Every Blogger owes a debt of gratitude to newspapers and magazines. This posting relies on original research and reporting performed by The New York Times.

“Does the company that makes your toaster get to tell you whose bread you can buy?”

That’s just one of a series of inspired metaphors employed by Cory Doctorow to express his irritation with e-book manufacturers employing Digital Rights Management, those proprietary restrictions on distribution of e-books (“DRM” for short).

His current target is Apple, whose iPad he believes is an “attempt to shackle your readers to its hardware.” His denunciation may  be found in his most recent monthly column in Publishers Weekly devoted to monitoring his thought processes as he prepares his book With a Little Help for self-publication. “Has there ever been an ‘appliance’ with the kind of competitive control Apple now enjoys over the iPad?” he asks (knowing the answer full well).

The iPad’s DRM restrictions mean that Apple has absolute dominion over who can run code on the device—and while that thin shellac of DRM will prove useless at things that matter to publishers, like preventing piracy, it is deadly effective in what matters to Apple: preventing competition.

Though Apple is the object of his ire this time, in the past he’s also taken a stick to Amazon, because what’s really bothering him is not device-specific.  It’s the underlying DRM that places authors, publishers and customers in an untenable position. “Devices like the iPad and the Kindle are a wholly new kind of thing—they function like bookshelves that reject all books except those the manufacturer has blessed…Having too much of your business subject to the whim of a single retailer who is out for its own interests is a scary and precarious thing.”

How scary and precarious? Enough to make him hold his books back from the iPad and urge us to do the same. “Just tell Apple it can’t license your copyrights—that is, your books—unless the company gives you the freedom to give your readers the freedom to take their products with them to any vendor’s system.”

Cory Doctorow is a good old-fashioned freedom fighter, which comes as no surprise given his activism on issues like nuclear disarmament and the environment. Here’s his PW article in its entirety:

Richard Curtis

Every Blogger owes a debt of gratitude to newspapers and magazines. This posting relies on original research and reporting performed by Publishers Weekly.

We recently attempted to explain the new ePub standard and did a pretty good job of simplifying it for the lay audience if we do say so ourselves. However, a reader’s comment suggests we may have oversimplified it. He introduced the concept of “wrapping” ePub in proprietary shell.

What does that mean and why is it important to you?

The ePub (short for “electronic publication”) standard, we explained, was designed to create an open, one-size-fits-all format. We said that Sony was planning to scrap its proprietary anticopying software in favor of ePub, enabling users to read e-books on any reading device that supports the ePub standard.

Well, yes – and no. Here’s what a correspondent wrote:

“Unfortunately, Sony’s version of ePub, as currently described, will be wrapped in Sony’s DRM, so books downloaded to Sony’s e-reader will not be readable on other devices. ePub does not necessarily mean open, which should be the goal of IDPF and the reading community.“

“DRM” stands for Digital Rights Management, a long way of saying controlled or restricted access to digital content. Proprietary, in other words. Kindle is an example of a proprietary, closed standard.

We referred the question to Michael Gaudet, who frequently unpacks technical complexities for us, and here is what he had to say to our commenter:

What I think you’re asking for is a world with no DRM. While you may see it as unfortunate that Sony isn’t as forward thinking as you’d like, I’m sure Sony and the IDPF are trying to be as realistic as possible in accommodating the ebook market’s suppliers: publishers.

ePub has always been formulated with the anticipation that retailers could wrap it in DRM if they needed to, and many publishers ask for DRM and won’t retail ebooks without it. Each ePub retailer needs to consider how to solve the DRM requirements for publishers and customers, and it’s never going to please everyone.

The biggest publishers who are still actively specifying DRM controls are members of the IDPF and they made these demands in standards meetings for the ePub format, and retailers like Sony and Content Reserve saw what’s coming down the road well in advance of their customers. It would have been suicide for Sony’s ebook store to ignore all the content from publishers who require DRM at this time just because it’s fashionable to bash DRM.

It’s unknown yet whether Sony’s ebookstore ePub implementation will be readable on other devices, but chances are that it can be, depending on the other devices’ software to unlock DRM from multiple vendors. It’s highly likely Adobe’s Digital Editions could support Sony’s ePub in the future, and if that’s possible, then so will other reader platforms that acknowledge ePub.

When customers choose to buy non-DRM books from other retailers that offer them, like Fictionwise, the Sony device is a very welcoming platform for ePub, and I think that’s probably more important than Sony’s store right now. The opportunity exists to read ePubs with or without DRM, and that’s better than where we were a year ago.

Obviously, ePub is not so white, and DRM is not so black. We hope you can live with shades of gray until a true One Size Fits All Standard rules all digital content.

RC