[WEB4LIB] RE: Gray Hats Re: Re: Jack Valenti: Copyright

[Lloyd Davidson]

 >At 10:28 03/21/2001 -0800, Richard Wiggins wrote:
 >
 >
 >I think there are lots of chicken-and-egg questions to resolve before 
secure containers rule mass market content >distribution.  Since e-books 
are in their infancy, maybe it really will happen there first.
 >
 >/rich


Ebooks are certainly one of the rapidly expanding market areas where such 
egregious. invasive systems will be implemented soon. Richard Stallman has 
a one page article concerning ebooks and this very issue in the Red Flags 
section of the most recent Communications of the ACM, which contains a 
variety of articles on predicted changes over The Next 1,000 Years (an 
ambitious subject--I would have been happy to know what is going to happen 
in the next 10).  To quote one sentence from Stallman's article (March 
2001/v.44(3), p.111), "Using encryption and watermarking systems, 
publishers hope to connect every copy of a book with a known person, and 
prevent anyone else from reading it."  It is quite possible under some of 
the more restrictive digital rights management system policies that even 
the quote of this single sentence would be disallowed.

Most Ebook publishers have business plans that simply don't include library 
borrowing as an option, the one possible exception being GlassBook.  Since 
GlassBook was recently purchased by Adobe, however, no one is sure how 
viable their library distribution plan is over the long term.  They 
probably don't either, and perhaps won't until they try it out.

The chicken and egg issue is definitely troublesome to an industry 
attempting to introduce a system as difficult to convince the public about 
as the distribution of encrypted packages of data.  However, since these 
are self contained packages that don't require any local modifications or 
probably even software installations, it is possible for publishers to 
begin issuing such products whenever they like.  I expect we will first 
encounter such encapsulated materials in the music and video markets, and 
probably in the near future.  Until Napster and other P2P products 
appeared, there wasn't a great deal of incentive to push this technology 
into the marketplace; now there is.

Lloyd