I do not intend this to be an amusing post. The issue is quite serious.
Tech Crunch writer John Biggs generated a post complaining about a situation in which someone from Norway had their Kindle account blocked (it was later restored) because it appears the individual was suspected of having illegal content. Biggs used this situation to argue that ebook owners should learn to remove DRM in order to protect their rights. I guess the logic is – if they can block you from using your content (legal or not), you should protect yourself by storing your content in a format you can use in other ways. There are several assumptions here, but I will let you figure out how he got from A to B yourself.
OK – so far we have one example that turned out not be an example, but suggestions for taking potentially illegal action to combat potentially illegal action are provided anyway.
This used to be a common argument made regarding DVDs. What if the DVD you purchased is damaged and you cannot view the content you own (even if the odds of viewing Revenge of the Nerds more than twice is about 0)? Hence, we learned to “back up” our content. However, since Amazon both allows you to download your books and keeps a copy online you can download again to the same or difference device, the argument you need to back up your content is a pretty weak to take. You pretty much must assume Amazon or other providers are evil.
Here is why I care. My wife and I have recently taken a textbook we have had published for years with a major publisher and self published it with Amazon. Advocating the removal of DRM from a book that costs less than $10 is not what I wanted to hear. This is not a high income enterprise.
Biggs argues:
However, the problem is in the publishers. Rights management is such a mess – especially in Europe – that it is no wonder these issues come mostly from cross-border rights disputes.
Rights management is a significant issue with publishers. This was the primary reason we finally broke from our publisher. However, our situation was different. Our intent was to repurpose our book into a Primer and online content and in the process reduce the price (our 5th edition still is selling for $120+). We intended to increase the total amount of content offering continuous upgrades of the online material and tutorials which we could provide as videos. This seemed like a reasonable strategy.
A sticking point ended up being the “permissions”. Publishing companies worry about permissions. There are countless tutorials on YouTube that were created without bothering to contact the software companies selling the software demonstrated, but a publishing company cannot move forward offering a similar tutorial without a signed permission. Plan to offer a dozen or so tutorials and some examples of classroom projects and you have a permissions nightmare. Not enough revenue in project we wanted to offer for $29. Too many lawyers involved in company to company disputes (see Send lawyers, guns, and money). It appears you cannot generate an inexpensive textbook when you must secure permissions from multiple companies. Perhaps I should have gone to law school.
Just for the record. One of the things we decided to do was to remove pretty much anything that would require a permission (even when we had previously acquired the permission) from our Kindle book and offer such content online (for free). So, if anyone removes DRM so they can read a $9 book in some other way, they are taking this action for some other reason.