One of the themes mentioned by just about every keynote speaker at the O’Reilly Tools of Change for Publishing conference last month in New York was Digital Rights Management (or DRM). This is software that prohibits unauthorized copies of media (songs, e-books, etc.). Cory Doctorow of boingboing.net fame gave an impassioned keynote titled “Digital Distribution and the Whip Hand: Don’t Get iTunesed with your eBooks.” His central point was that the music industry has handled the whole DRM thing poorly (suing college students?), and that Apple swooped in with an awesome product (iTunes) that allowed it to be a dominant platform in the industry. The latest news, of course, is that Apple is dropping DRM on songs offered on iTunes.
Doctorow’s pitch (as well as other keynoters’) was that publishers should insist on no DRM on their products to prevent third-party intermediate platforms (like the Amazon Kindle, which has a propriety DRM) from controlling distribution. Will people copy electronic files without DRM? Sure, but they already do. Check out PirateBay.org. As long as there is technological curiosity and cheap labor, there won’t be a way to stop copying files (with or without DRM). Of course, it was the evolution of technology—the Internet—that made DRM an issue.
The accompanying rights issue that floated to the top of the blogs over the last few weeks is the fact that the new Kindle Reader has a text-to-speech converter that the Authors Guild claimed infringes on the audio rights of its authors (discussed in this New York Times op-ed piece). After the initial tussle, Amazon backed down and said that the publisher/author could decide whether the TTS function is enabled on a per-title basis.
But the debate isn’t over. Cory Doctorow addressed the TTS issue, saying that you can’t stop the technology from advancing. I don’t believe so either: The computer voices will continue to get better, voice inflection at the right place in the text will evolve, and so on. Before long you’ll be able to pick the “voice” you want to “read” your book—James Earl Jones or Pee Wee Herman—which will raise a completely different set of rights issue. But I digress.
Neither publishers nor the Authors Guild will be able to stop the march of technology that consumers want; they’d better get in front of the freight train and put some energy into redefining what traditional rights mean, instead of clinging to past thinking. That’s what happened to the music industry. Let’s not let it happen to word publishing.
