Meanwhile, as Mr Chen tries to leave China for the dubious safety of American academia and one wonders exactly how the Supreme Court deals with dissent expressed as a phoneme fricative... and ponder what to do about John Yoo...
- The (objective) need to kill off DRM is one of the (many) aspects of publishing and the internet that Cory Doctorow and I agree upon. Some publishers are starting to agree. Leaving aside that DRM is a counterproductive equivalent of razor-blade-handle compatibility (and yes, I know that's a myth not supported by evidence... but it's a myth accepted by MBAs, so it acts like it's true), the real problem with DRM is that it just plain doesn't work. The speed with which DeCSS appeared — and the rapidity of updates to free software for breaking DVD and other multimedia "encryption" schemes when they are tweaked — should be a hint.
The ultimate problem with DRM is that it is inherently vulnerable to the known-plaintext attack, since the output appears on devices that are not, themselves, secure. Thus, all it really requires is comparing the input DRMed file to the viewable output and some (now trivially available) computing capacity. It's not even as secure as a typical door lock; imagine, instead, the effectiveness of the door locks we have now in a society in which basic lockpicking is a high-school graduation requirement...
- Keeping on the theme of e-books, the real question is who is going to make them available to the public (to use the Berne Convention's language). Authors and author cooperatives are certainly one possibility. That doesn't answer the pricing problem, but it at least gets pricing away from the mythical memes common in the publishing industry (the common "higher of {10(per-copy reproduction costs)} and {6(extended per-copy cost basis)}") that made sense in the 1960s (maybe), but no longer. This is also one of the issues lurking behind the federal antitrust suit against Apple and several major commercial publishers over the
agency modelRPMA pricing scheme: Not so much how to set prices as who establishes prices.At least this doesn't have anything to do with prices in the world of fine-art originals. Or does it? Let's see, now: Monopsonistic auction system; use of outliers to set base prices; ...
- Then there's the question of where the money spent on e-books goes. Hint: not to the authors (n.b. Ignore the "malicious site" warnings you may get at that link — they're the result of a hack and no longer an issue, if they ever were). And there's a fascinating flip-side look at the same issue to consider, too.