I’ve got a legal background, so this has been an interest of mine for a while. In your opinion, what do you think the proper balance between creator profits and “ownership” over digital goods? If it’s completely open formats, then there is nothing to stop piracy, but buying a license with DRM takes away our ownership rights we would have otherwise had over stuff we buy. If you had Congress’s ear, how would you strike that balance?
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I think we tried this with NFTs once. That was a massive failure. However, it’s a valid question and probably the reason most of the distribution moved from digital, but physical media like CDs and DVDs, to streaming.
Philosophically, I lean towards allowing free copying, but I’m quick to poke at those who expect their favorite creators would continue to work hard for them if they couldn’t protect their creations. It would change the market significantly.
Actual widespread ownership of IP is also an interesting idea to me, e.g. selling shares in an LLC for an album rather than licenses. The legislation and the hardware/software tooling to support freely using media you legally own doesn’t exist, and would be very hard to explain to the public even if it could be passed, and would be a headache for most creators.
Practically, more portable/interchangeable DRM is probably the answer so licensing becomes invisible again. The media “ownership” movement is mostly grumpy about licensing becoming more obvious.
Yeah. I think the ability to convert Ebooks from Kindle, Kobo, Apple etc… might be the trick. I might be the only one but I would kill for an Audible Like Tier for Apple Music. Where instead of all the music for a monthly fee. You get a Pandora Esque Radio curation (I miss iTunes Radio) and an Album of the month that you own. I think we devalued music but people not owning music anymore.
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I have no problem with DRM, People need to be paid for what they make.
The difficult part is making the DRM perpetual. You don’t want to invest in a lot of digital media and then 15 years later you can no longer watch/listen to it. This alongside those who bought media through iTunes and it can’t be passed on when you die.
There’s no easy answer sadly.
So for music, anyone under 20 will be paying £10, £15, £20 a month (with regular price hikes) to access any music they wish, with the largest music stars selling their libraries/catalogues for many hundreds of millions of dollars, the cost of which will cascade down to the people paying to listen, as subscriptions are increased year on year by above inflation amounts.
£15 a month over 50 years is £9k
This is why I buy CDs and still rip them. I especially love a second hand bargain.
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I will say that if you still buy from the iTunes store. Those tracks are DRM free.
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I am a Los Angeles trial lawyer who has devoted 27 years of time and attention to the entertainment industry (and tech for that matter), I have some opinions. I cannot share them because my own clients take various positions on the spectrum of what this balance should be.
I will start with this, though. creators can make as much profit as they can when they price their creative works initially. They can charge what they want. The real question is what can the buyer do with the purchased copyrighted work. Under U.S. Copyright law, the copyright owner has the following six core exclusive rights to his, her, or its copyrighted work:
- Reproduce: Make copies or phonorecords of the copyrighted work (e.g., photocopying a book, pressing a vinyl record, or saving a digital file).
- Adapt (Derivative Works): Prepare new works based on the original (e.g., turning a novel into a movie, translating text, or creating a musical arrangement).
- Distribute: Sell, rent, lease, or lend copies of the work to the public.
- Perform Publicly: Perform the work live or broadcast it to the public (e.g., playing a song on the radio, staging a play, or screening a film).
- Display Publicly: Show a copy of the work directly or by means of a device (e.g., exhibiting a painting, showing an image on a website, or broadcasting a television still).
- Perform via Digital Audio Transmission: Specifically for sound recordings, the right to stream the work digitally (e.g., playing a song on platforms like Spotify or Pandora).
So, the copyright owner can exclude anyone from doing the things listed here (subject to exceptions), and thus, charge money for permitting people to do them.
Whether the creator “profits” or not almost always depends not on the copyright, but on the deal the creator negotiates with a movie studio, record label/publishing house, television broadcaster, cable channel, book publisher, or the like.
Most of the issues are determined at the contract level, not at the usage level.
DRM tools — horrible as they are — are tools to enforce existing rights under law. Some DRM systems are over the top (why can’t I select and copy text from a WSJ article that I’m reading on my ipad)?
I do think many DRM regimes are user hostile, but keep in mind that those tools also prevent very easy, very widespread breaking of existing law.
The questions here are largely policy choices.
By the way, I’m presently litigating a class action regarding an NFT. It’s not targeted at ownership issues and profitability like we are talking about here, though.
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I think you can convert Kindle books. I thought there was a legal tool that let you convert from mobi to epub and to back-up your books. But I may have dreamt that up.
True. But, AFAIK, the purchasers name, email address, and Apple ID are still embedded in every music file.
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Legalish* and Kindle is locking down that capacity and making it impossible to extract the file from Kindle.
I started buying ebooks in the 1990s. I have lost access to expensive (as in hundreds per title) digital facsimiles, ebooks and music as DRM methds were no longer supported (hello Adobe), distributers have gone out of business (too many early ebook producers to list), or rights to music or ebooks changed (Apple and Amazon). I’ve lost access to items I licensed from Amazon and Apple enough times that if I expect I will want a book or album indefinitely I buy the physical edition as well as digital versions.
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More recent versions are, but not the earlier ones.
They’re also tagged with your ID
and almost all of them (apart from Apple’s) have been deprecated leaving people unable to play the digital media they bought.
To the best of my knowledge, there is no Amazon tool that will convert a .mobi or AZW file to ePub. Nor is there a tool that will back up your Kindle books to anything other than a Kindle device. As far as Amazon is concerned, you haven’t purchased a book, you’ve only been granted a license to read one on a Kindle device or in a Kindle app. “Back Up” is not a concept under that rubric: if a book has been corrupted or it’s been deleted from your device, you download it again. If Amazon has pulled the book from its offerings for what ever reason, you’re SOL: it’s gone.
It is possible to strip the DRM off of a Kindle book, convert it to another format, and read it on something other than a Kindle with third party tools. Amazon recently made that more fiddly to do, but it’s not impossible.
As has been well explained, “creator profits” isn’t really the issue. How much money someone will make (or more likely not make) from the book they write, the coding they do or the painting or image they create is much more to do with marketing, distribution etc and who they contract with, for what purposes than it is to do with drm and the like. I’ve “given away” almost everything I’ve created or at best received a tiny recompense out of all proportion to the time and effort I have invested in the creation.
I think there is real value in thinking about “creator’s” rights vs “user rights”. How much control should the (sometimes many) people involved in creating an original work retain over their creation, for how long and what should they be able to do in order to exercise that control, especially once they share the work? Very few people would say “none” but most folks would feel that you buy some control when you hand over money - if books, images and software remained under the exclusive control of the creator (e.g books or pictures could disappear when s/he decided) readers would be unhappy and willing to pay much less for the limited control we’d be buying.
Part of the issue is that technology has made so much practically possible that wasn’t. We can make unlimited, perfect copies of digital media with ease but creators can also impose at least some control over what we can do with digital media (e.g. drm). We still make assumptions in terms of physical products (like printed books or CDs) but we left that world behind quite a while ago.
I find it remarkable that publishers have managed to retain so many aspects of the previous markets they controlled: to give just one example, in a world of digital books, there really shouldn’t be the concept of a highly expensive “hardback” for a book’s first release which then becomes a cheaper “paperback” later, nor should ebooks cost the same as printed books, especially when a printed book has a life in decades and can be resold, lent etc. when an ebook is essentially ephemeral and limited in comparison.
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I have often said that we have analog brains in a digital world. It will be a long time before our brains do not default to “analog” parallels to “goods” in the digital world.
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The issue to me is that DRM-based content retailers don’t seem to be trying to strike that balance.
Let’s say you write a book. You own the copyright; it’s your original work. You provide it to Kindle, and they sell it. You get the DRM file of your own book, and just for kicks, run a de-DRM program on the book. Congratulations - you’ve potentially committed a felony.
We’re not even dealing with the underlying rights at that point. We have a system where any rights you have to the underlying content are irrelevant, because you would have to break a digital lock to access that content - and that’s arguably a felony.
There are also the issues where, for example, a movie studio licenses their content to a DRM’d content provider, and then down the road they pull the rights from the content provider. The user loses their rights to the content, because the content provider lost their rights - but the movie studio got their money for the content, and will get paid again if the user re-purchases the content.
Now…note that I’ve used the words “potentially” and “arguably.” That’s because there’s an argument that if you break the DRM for a book you paid for (or actually own), and you’re just using that book on a different platform (rather than distributing it), you might be okay in a legal sense. But if a publisher goes after you, you’d incur the (likely substantial) costs of defending yourself in court.
I don’t mind the licensing model, or even necessarily DRM - but it’s massively unbalanced as it sits.
I feel like the best “balance” at least as far as I can conceive if we were to revamp copyright laws is a “right to transfer platforms.” The ability to take your books to other devices and other stores. If it is purely “open” than copyright is a dead letter (which harms artists). Consumers are being harmed because it locks people in ecosystems. Basically a “movies anywhere” required by law.
I would like to be able to build a personal server to access my Apple Video content offline. Raspberry Pi’s are like the perfect devices for that but it will be a cold day in hell before Apple makes Apple TV and/or quicktime for Linux.
Yeah, exactly. And you could even exempt small creators. But there’s no reason that companies the size of Random House, Warner Bros, etc. couldn’t make something reasonable happen.
You could also potentially make enforcement of any IP assigns contingent on providing the obligations under the purchase agreements - at least for some defined minimum period of time. So if a publisher goes out of business, whoever inherits their catalog of IP couldn’t sue a user who purchased a DRM-encoded ebook for breaking the DRM UNLESS the holder provided a reasonable way to access the book’s content without doing so.
Hardcover books are primarily sold to libraries. They are physically more durable. Libraries buy them once and they circulate many times over the course of years.
Mass-market paperbacks are primarily sold to consumers. Trade paperbacks still outsell ebooks. Even on an individual title basis, most trade paperbacks outsell the ebook versions of the same title.
Ebooks are licensed to libraries not just per copy but per circulation/time. Libraries, like consumers, don’t own ebooks they license them, and that license is more expensive and more limited than the license a consumer purchases in that it’s not buy once own indefinitely or until the artifact is unusable. Libraries work with vendors (i.e. Overdrive, 3M Cloud Library, Boundless, etc.) who charge for a license based on multiple readers over a specific perid of time, then the license expires and so does the utility of the digital file. The file is designed to have a limited lifespan.
I can license an ebook as an individual consumer and in almost all cases I can read that book as many times as I want, until something about the technology fails (or tyere’s a rights issue and my lcense eds).
I have purchased licenses for non-DRM books from c. 2001 that are still viable as files though my Palm PDA is going to die at some point. That’s not true for library licenses.
The cost of trade publishing a book is weighted in terms of creator labor and IP (writer, artist, designer, editors, typesetter, proofers), rather than cost of physical production.
Costs are the same for print and digital up to the point where the cover art, designed, edited, typeset, proofed digital file is forked, with one version going to the printer(s), and one to the ebook production, where the file is forked again to create versions for different vendors.
Ebooks are only “cheaper” to produce post fork. The production costs of paper, ink, binding are not the most expensive costs of trade publishing a printed book. Creative labor is most of the cost of production, and those costs are shared for print and digital, up to the file fork.
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