Comment by toomuchtodo
2 days ago
DRM and control over the knowledge within. This is why the Internet Archive fought and lost against publishers to lend ebooks; their goal was to be a library, not just a long term storage archive. The industry treats ebooks as a license, but first sale doctrine preserves the right for libraries to buy and lend books out at no additional cost per rental period. And so, they can only collect and vault knowledge until copyright laws change, while others are not constrained to share liberally (Anna's Archive, Z-lib, etc).
If everything is locked up in ebooks with DRM (Amazon recently nuked old Kindles to close a DRM loophole), culture is locked behind corporate paywalls.
DRM wouldn’t be a problem if it were unambiguously legal to break it and if copyright durations weren’t so ridiculously long. I have free and legal access to all the ebooks I could ever want from Standard Ebooks, Project Gutenberg, and so on, except for that last 95‐year chunk. There needs to be an appetite for copyright reform to extend and make permanent DMCA exemptions and to reduce copyright terms.
>>What’s wrong with e-books?
>DRM
You're downloading them wrong.
> If everything is locked up in ebooks with DRM (Amazon recently nuked old Kindles to close a DRM loophole), culture is locked behind corporate paywalls.
Yes, that's what funds the creation of culture. If intellectual property is unprotected, then creators of that property are not supported.
Please provide a citation supporting this assertion.