Managing Rights Management

Will DRM Help E-Textbook Publishers?

DRM may help, at least for a while. That's the implication of Randall Stross' NYTimes article on evolving business models for college textbooks.

The textbook publishers have abundantly good reasons to promote e-books. When Cengage sells an e-book version of “Organic Chemistry” directly to students, for $109.99, it not only cuts out the middleman but also reduces the supply of used books at the end of the semester.

THE e-book is wrapped with digital rights management, which, history indicates, will be broken sooner or later. But as long as it does work, digital publishing with a subscription model is a much fairer basis for the business. Such an arrangement spreads revenue across multiple semesters, so it isn’t the unfortunate few students in the first semester with a new edition who shoulder the bulk of the burden.

Adobe DRM and LG Electornic Book Patents

Today's Spotlight issued patents concern various aspects of digital rights management.  Assigned to Adobe, the first patent concerns nestable skeleton decryption keys for digital rights management. Assigned to LG Electronics, the second patent concerns techniques for providing digital electronic books.

Defective by Design Targets eBooks

The Defective by Design anti-DRM campaign has targeted eBook readers and books from Amazon and Sony:

• When you purchase a DRM ebook, it is locked to a single device. When the device breaks or becomes outdated, you can no longer read your ebook. You buy a lock, but you don't own the key! If you try to pick the DRM-lock on an ebook so you can read your book on another device, you break US Federal Law (The Digital Millenium Copyright Act).

• DRM ebooks are bad for authors and publishers. The owners of DRM technology get to decide which books, newspapers, and magazines can be put into their DRM formats. The DRM technology owners can deny whomever and whatever they wish from using their format. DRM allows for digital censorship.

So their answer seems to be enable piracy and reduce the revenue of publishers. It's a point of view, to be sure, but not one with which I agree.

 

Keeping Honest People Honest

The BBC has published a Q&A with entertainment industry execs that's worth reading. The questions cover a broad range of topics, including: Why not have simultaneous global release; What's being done to save cinemas; Why not illegally download; Why have region encoding on DVDs; and What's the point of DRM?

The response of the MPAA's Dan Glickman is noteworthy:

Content owners use DRMs because it provides casual, honest users with guidelines for using and consuming content based on the usage rights that were acquired. Without the use of DRMs, honest consumers would have no guidelines and might eventually come to totally disregard copyright and therefore become a pirate, resulting in great harm to content creators.

DRMs' primary role is not about keeping copyrighted content off P2P networks. DRMs support an orderly market for facilitating efficient economic transactions between content producers and content consumers.

There's some truth to this point of view.

eTextBooks Redux

Market forces seems to be having some effect on the specifics of the rules associated with eTextbooks, this according to John Borland's CNet blogicle.  Snippets:

The eTextbook BruHaha And Business Sin 4

A few days ago, I noted that a number of publishers, booksellers,  and colleges were marketing DRM-protected textbooks. The debate / commentary continues, including articles on Tom's Hardware site, ZDNet and this  summary from CNET.

My own view is that DRMed eBooks are just fine. The problem is the business model(s). The publishers seem to be committing one of management consultant Peter Drucker's (a personal hero) Five Deadly Business Sins, namely, slaughtering tomorrow's opportunities on the alter of yesterday.

DRMed College Textbooks

[tip o' the hat to Dave Farber's IP list.] DigitalTextbooks.net has announced a program involving five  publishers and apparently  several collages beginning this Fall to distribute college textbooks in Adobe Acrobat (PDF) format. Supported interactive features include document searching, highlighting, underlining, note taking, and in some cases, read-out-loud capability.

I suspect that it will take a while to figure out a set of DRM restrictions that balances market demand and convenience  with publishers' rights and revenue. According to one source, the the program is being launched with the following restrictions:
 

Speaking of eBooks

The International Herald Tribune has an article on the relationship between eBooks and print editions that's worth a gander. Snippets: