Kestrell

Book scanning: it's not piracy, it's transformational

Thu, 11 Oct 2012 20:05:01 GMT

Wow! I feel like I'm coming out of the transmedia closet. This is one more for the technopeasants (I have a t-shirt for that). Too bad Googlebooks is all inaccessible, but you can find many of the scanned texts from the university project at archive.org .
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20121011/01250620675/court-book-scanning-is-obviously-fair-use.shtml

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Rowling to release Harry Potter ebooks DRM-free: Radiohead moment or just desperate to sell more boo

Fri, 24 Jun 2011 12:11:19 GMT

Kes: Not that I'm not perfectly fine with authors trying to find a way to sell more books, but dressing it up as her trusting her fans and the other malarky included in this completely uncritical article
http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2011/06/harry-potter-radiohead-moment/

is absurd:

Unlike artists such as Radiohead and others who trust their fans to reimburse the artists or author for DRM-free material, Rowling has always been extremely hostile to the ebook format and, rather than placing any blame upon the big publishers, has in her statements equated ebooks with piracy, thereby pointing the finger at her fans as criminals, not the publishers.

Releasing ebooks DRM-free isn't a trust issue anymore, if it ever was. Releasing ebooks DRM-free makes financial sense, as people who buy ebooks want to be able to read their ebooks on more than one device.

And these articles which are puffing Rowling up as trusting her fans, that's just bullshit which counts on consumers having the memory capacity of a goldfish.

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Essay on copyright law and the Constitution

Fri, 30 Jul 2010 13:42:31 GMT

Open Spaces Magazine has an essay titled
"The Purpose of Copyright" by Lydia Pallas Loren
http://www.open-spaces.com/article-v2n1-loren.php
which offers an explanation of copyright law as it is written in the Constitution. The text is clear and specific, and well worth reading, especially for blind and visually impaired readers like myself who are daily affected by resultant laws and trends, such as Fair Use and the
recent announcement by the Librarian of Congress
http://www.copyright.gov/1201/
that readers with disabilities are allowed to "jailbreak" digital materials with DRM
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2010/07/apple-loses-big-in-drm-ruling-jailbreaks-are-fair-use.ars
which prevents access.

Actually, this is just a fascinating essay all around, as the law professor who wrote it contextualizes it within the founding fathers's original intention of preventing copyright law from being used as a tool for censorship.

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I'm not a pirate, I'm a privateer

Mon, 26 Jul 2010 18:51:28 GMT

Description of the icon I would like to have here: short blind woman with a white cane/sword and an eyepatch made from the page of a book.

Kes: I can't help but think that this ruling will only serve to further muck up the issue of ensuring that ebooks, including textbooks, are made accessible to people using adaptive technologies. Publishers continue to make ebooks wrapped up in DRM which locks out screen reader users, but it's the screen reader users who are being forced to break laws if they want access while publishers are still not held accountable for conforming to the ADA, twenty years old this week and still only kind of sort of a law.

Of course, you are going to have to be one of those blind hackers who actually knows how to crack the DRM, because this is not the stuff that most blind bloggers are going to be posting about (and being held legally liable for) on their personal or professional blogs.

Maybe we should organize a massive online pirate crack-in where hundreds of blind readers break the DRM simultaneously?

Article: Apple loses big in DRM ruling: jailbreaks are "fair use"

By
Nate Anderson
| Last updated about 2 hours ago

Every three years, the Library of Congress has the thankless task of listening to people complain about the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. The DMCA forbade
most attempts to bypass the digital locks on things like DVDs, music, and computer software, but it also gave the Library the ability to wave its magical
copyright wand and make certain DRM cracks legal for three years at a time.

This time, the
Library went (comparatively) nuts,
http://www.copyright.gov/1201/
allowing widespread bypassing of the CSS encryption on DVDs, declaring iPhone jailbreaking to be "fair use," and letting consumers crack their legally
purchased e-books in order to have them read aloud by computers.

You can read the rest of this detailed article here
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2010/07/apple-loses-big-in-drm-ruling-jailbreaks-are-fair-use.ars
but the part I want to highlight here is
block quote start
(6) Literary works distributed in ebook format when all existing ebook editions of the work (including digital text editions made available by authorized
entities) contain access controls that prevent the enabling either of the book’s read-aloud function or of screen readers that render the text into a specialized format.
block quote end

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Book review: The Pirates' Dilemma: How Youth Culture is Reinventing Capitalism

Mon, 28 Sep 2009 17:16:14 GMT

The Pirates' Dilemma: How Youth Culture is Reinventing Capitalism
by Matt Mason, available for download at
http://thepiratesdilemma.com/download-the-book

This book was a pure delight to my little media studies soul, and I give it five stars. If you are interested in cyberculture, remix media, and the subversive uses of technology, you should read this book. If you purchase it through the author's Web site, he's only asking $5 for an accessible PDF version (I think this requires PayPal), but you can also find it on Fictionwise, granted at a higher price.

I originally read about this book on the TeleRead blog, which described it as "an interesting tour through the disruptive effects youth culture has had on society through the last few decades..." The big surprise for me was that Matt Mason begins his story with a discussion of punk music which he connects to the DIY movement. Later chapters discuss connections between such topics as the hippie counterculture and computers, hiphop music and street fashion, graffiti and virul marketing, even disco and remix culture. You might think that some of these connections sound pretty unlikely, but Mason knows his stuff, and he includes hundreds of links to online articles to verify his sources. In addition, he has done a lot of reading from academia, although he makes the process pretty painless.

Another source for Mason's text is his work as a music journalist, and many of the quotes and comments which pepper the book were originally from interviews Mason himself conducted with the musicians. In addition to these conversations with the musicians, Mason includes interview material from street artists, pirate radio DJs, club MCs, and more.

A lot of these technologies and media have been around for a decade or two now, and yet a lot of the mainstream remains ignorant about how the tech works or the motivations the artists and fans have for adopting these subversive modes of creating and sharing media. What's more incredible is that a lot of the people who are making the laws regarding media technologies are still ignorant of what precisely they are creating laws for.

block quote begin
In the United States in March 2007, Congressman Mike Doyle
made a speech defending remix culture in the House, schooling his fellow
politicians on the new rules of twenty-first-century creativity. He
said at a hearing discussing the future of music:

I hope that everyone involved will take a step back and ask themselves
if mash-ups and mixtapes are really different or if it’s the
same as Paul McCartney admitting that he nicked the Chuck Berry
bass-riff and used it on the Beatles’ hit “I Saw Her Standing
There.”

Maybe it is . . . or maybe mixtapes are a powerful tool. And
maybe mash-ups are transformative new art that expands the
consumers’ experience and doesn’t compete with what an artist
has made available on iTunes or at the CD store. And I don’t
think Sir Paul asked for permission to borrow that bass line, but
every time I listen to that song, I’m a little better off for him having
done so.

The speech was inspiring. It seems the powers that be are beginning
to get to grips with the Pirate’s Dilemma. But to illustrate how much
work needs to be done before politicians everywhere understand how
valuable the remix can be, consider the opening remarks of congressman
John Shimkus of Illinois who spoke after Mr. Doyle. He said:
“Hey, Mr. Chairman, I was just trying to figure out half of the words
that Mike Doyle just mentioned. I am clueless.”
block quote end

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If you were hoping Barnes & Noble would be providing an easier, friendlier eBook experience for the

Tue, 28 Jul 2009 15:55:54 GMT

the concensus
http://www.teleread.org/2009/07/26/bns-e-bookstore-gets-clueful-pan-from-the-washington-post-including-criticism-of-drm/
seems to be, think again. Various venues from TeleRead to The Washington Post are commenting that, if Barnes & Noble wants to compete with Amazon in the eBook market, they are going to have to offer a new and saner model, hopefully one which takes a page from Fictionwise and offers DRM-free eBooks and an easier purchasing process.

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