I got a new mac recently – oh joy! – and happened to notice this bit of the set-up instructions.
If you don’t intend to keep or use your other Mac, it’s best to deauthorize it from playing music, videos, or audiobooks that you’ve purchased from the iTunes Store. Deauthorizing a computer prevents any songs, videos, or audiobooks you’ve purchased from being played by someone else and frees up another authorization for use.
Because listening to someone else’s songs is like using someone else’s toothbrush, the Lord knows. Don’t get me started about lending books. The book mobile would roll through town, just as during the crusades the rotting, infected heads of the dead were lobbed over the walls of besieged towns, to dismay and disease the defenders …
I think someone told this story before:
This put Dan in a dilemma. He had to help her—but if he lent her his computer, she might read his books. Aside from the fact that you could go to prison for many years for letting someone else read your books, the very idea shocked him at first. Like everyone, he had been taught since elementary school that sharing books was nasty and wrong—something that only pirates would do.
Which reminds me of this screed against Amazon’s Kindle, the Future of Reading (a Play in Six Acts).
Speaking of which: the Kindle
As I was saying: Kindle is selling and – as I’ve said – I’m kinda excited that maybe eBooks are finally arriving in a big way. One thing I’d like to sort out is how I feel about the this:
You may not sell, rent, lease, distribute, broadcast, sublicense or otherwise assign any rights to the Digital Content or any portion of it to any third party, and you may not remove any proprietary notices or labels on the Digital Content. In addition, you may not, and you will not encourage, assist or authorize any other person to, bypass, modify, defeat or circumvent security features that protect the Digital Content.
Abrogating the first sale doctrine, in other words. (Among other things.) I don’t know how this will play out, legally. It’s certainly annoying, just like that bit from my Mac set-up instructions. But I’m not actually worried that we will be stranded in a nightmare future whose sad inhabitants have been indoctrinated into thinking it is gross for other people to listen to their music. I am annoyed to think that I might pay almost full price for a book that I don’t technically own. I’m just ‘licensing’. At the same time, maybe this is a price point issue, rather than one of principle. If the eBooks are a lot cheaper, maybe it’s an acceptable trade-off. One thing that seems weird and probably temporary is that academic books available on Kindle cost almost as much as their dead tree counterparts.
Example: my department just hired the redoubtable Neil Sinhababu. Good for us! He has a new book on Nietzsche and Morality
But at least it isn’t as stupid as arguing that throwing away promo CD’s is piracy.
{ 32 comments }
Ginger Yellow 04.29.08 at 4:30 pm
The “only slightly cheaper” pricing model is almost endemic to digital distribution, and it’s really bad for the market. The most obvious example is Audible and other audiobook providers, who charge almost full retail price for a tiny bit of bandwidth and storage, and royaltes. As a result I own maybe three audiobooks. If they were half the retail price, I’d own dozens. Itunes gets it more or less right, at least in the UK, where albums can cost £16 retail and new releases are rarely less than £10 (especially now that Fopp has gone bust).
Ginger Yellow 04.29.08 at 4:30 pm
Correction: I meant to say “only slightly cheaper with officious DRM”.
John Holbo 04.29.08 at 4:46 pm
“The most obvious example is Audible and other audiobook providers, who charge almost full retail price for a tiny bit of bandwidth and storage, and royaltes.”
I actually just joined audible. I agree that I would buy more of they are cheaper but I think it’s a good deal. The thing is: the retail price for audiobooks on CD is usually exorbitant. Much more than for paper. So paying just a bit less than you would for paper for the download is actually a good deal. That’s my impression, at least.
Delicious Pundit 04.29.08 at 4:50 pm
The thought that the lunacy of that approach to sales could actually be exported to the Kindle is maddening.
When I hear right-wing types run down idiotic government decisions, sometimes I like to console myself by thinking of the many, many idiotic decisions that the private sector is equally capable of making.
richard 04.29.08 at 4:51 pm
One thing I’d like to sort out is how I feel about the this
What’s to sort out? Abrogating the first sale doctrine is disgusting and ludicrous, but you feel free to ignore it in practice, right? That doesn’t sound like a safe or robust position to be working from: if it’s absurd, let’s feel it, and then start complaining.
John Holbo 04.29.08 at 5:06 pm
“Abrogating the first sale doctrine is disgusting and ludicrous”
I actually don’t think it is. I think it’s disgusting to try to make people feel like they should be disgusted by the thought of other people reading their books. But if someone offered me three books for the price of 1, but I couldn’t resell them, I might take the deal. Crippleware is an insult. Cutrate crippleware is bizarre, but maybe a fair offer. I’m not sure it’s a slippery slope to something very bad. I dunno.
SamChevre 04.29.08 at 5:20 pm
When I hear right-wing types run down idiotic government decisions, sometimes I like to console myself by thinking of the many, many idiotic decisions that the private sector is equally capable of making.
Well, as one of those right-wing types, I certainly can’t disagree. It’s just the duration difference that makes me prefer the private sector. (I’m betting that DRM will go away before software copyrights.)
John,
In the first quote, is the last word “use”? That would make the whole thing make some sense. (If you deauthorize one computer, you can then authorize a different one–so theoretically, both your computers work.)
[thanks, typo corrected. – JH]
Great Zamfir 04.29.08 at 5:23 pm
I’m with JH here, and anyone who visits libraries or rents movies presumably agrees too. If the price is low enough, not getting full ownership is worth it.
Or consider renting a house: that isn’t even much cheaper than buying. It would be completely possible to write a ‘Right-to-housing’ dystopia about a place where you do not actually own your house, and you cannot sublet it without telling the owner, and where the government knows exactly where you live, and companies use that information to send you junk mail and people feel queasy about strangers staying in their houses etc. etc.
Of course the analogy is not perfect, but to some extent it’s just what you are used to that determines what feels normal.
tom s. 04.29.08 at 5:25 pm
I’m going to repeat something I say every time the eBook discussion comes up.
LARGE PRINT.
If Amazon/Sony solve that, they’ve got a baby-boom full of poor-eyed readers desperate for something – anything – other than 1970s romance novels and historical fiction who will soon be battering down their virtual doors with their retirement plans and old age pensions, licence management be damned.
And I speak as one of them before too long. Or at least I would be if I had a retirement plan.
John Emerson 04.29.08 at 5:55 pm
While we’re at it, could I request a post about how horrible JSTOR and all the others are for putting academic papers behind a $10-$20 paywall. I don’t have a university library connection at the moment, but I’m very rarely willing to pay that kind of price (perhaps 3-5 times altogether), and my guess is that very few others are either for something as unappetizing as academic papers, and that whatever small revenues there are don’t go to the right people anyway.
noen 04.29.08 at 6:44 pm
If I buy a CD and then lose it can I then download it for free (or in good conscience) since I still have the license to listen to it, right?
Or maybe this isn’t about “rights” at all. Maybe it’s all about power being able to do whatever it wants to.
Slocum 04.29.08 at 7:24 pm
DRM sucks, plain and simple. Why does anyone buy DRM’ed music from the iTunes store, when DRM-free music is available for the same price from Amazon?
As for ebooks — I’m one of the few who likes reading on a little LCD screen. I had a Rocket eBook way back when and use a little web tablet for ebooks now. But only public domain content and stuff I scan myself — I’m not buying commercial ebooks from Amazon (or anyone else) until they’re sold DRM-free just like MP3s now are.
richard 04.29.08 at 7:31 pm
If the price is low enough, not getting full ownership is worth it.
Hmmm. I’ll have to think more about this; there are many kinds of ownership, and outright purchase is in some ways an outlier on the spectrum.
I’m particularly bothered by Microsoft trying to mess with law of first sale on PCs (claiming that a machine that has windows installed on it cannot then be resold etc etc), and I can see an analogy to the Kindle – you’ve bought the device, not rented it: if your choice of software is intentionally limited to things you don’t quite own, what does that do to your purchase? But I find the Stallman and Pilgrim links above pretty compelling on the slippery slope argument.
giotto 04.29.08 at 8:19 pm
If you don’t intend to keep or use your other Mac, it’s best to deauthorize it from playing music, videos, or audiobooks that you’ve purchased from the iTunes Store.
That is just good advice. If you do not do this, everytime you replace an old computer with a new one, and if you sell or give away the old computer, you will lose one of your authorizations (I think the limit is 5??), until, one day, you will be down to just one. It isn’t a matter of it being “gross” to have others listen to your music; it is a matter of giving away vs not giving away the rights to listen to music you’ve purchased. But yeah, the situation leads me to concur with slocum: why pay money for something that you will not fully own???
lemuel pitkin 04.30.08 at 1:48 am
Anybody here know any classical musicians?
I’ve recently been dating a professional musician (yes, there’s someone for everyone, even pseudonymous blog commenters) and one interesting thing I’ve learned is that using only “real copies” is a very strongly held value in the classical music world. Orchestras mail them to performers, and if a composer sees his work being performed on photocopier- or printer-made copies, it’s potentially a major scandal.
In this particular case, IP fundamentalism seems harmless, even charming. But it’s further proof that Stallman’s fable is not at all far from reality.
John Holbo 04.30.08 at 3:04 am
“If you don’t intend to keep or use your other Mac, it’s best to deauthorize it from playing music, videos, or audiobooks that you’ve purchased from the iTunes Store.
That is just good advice. If you do not do this, everytime you replace an old computer with a new one, and if you sell or give away the old computer, you will lose one of your authorizations”
Yes, but what struck me was that the passage seemed to emphasize that the badness of losing an authorization was something over and above the badness of someone else just plain listening to your music.
Henry (not the famous one) 04.30.08 at 3:07 am
Never lend books — nobody ever returns them; the only books I have in my library are those which people have lent me.
Anatole France
John Holbo 04.30.08 at 3:29 am
“I’ve recently been dating a professional musician (yes, there’s someone for everyone, even pseudonymous blog commenters) and one interesting thing I’ve learned is that using only “real copies†is a very strongly held value in the classical music world. Orchestras mail them to performers, and if a composer sees his work being performed on photocopier- or printer-made copies, it’s potentially a major scandal.”
Hmmm, I performed in an orchestra up to the upper levels of amateurism, years ago (up through U of Chicago Symphony). Everyone was always pretty laid back about photocopying. I never thought about IP in those days and never really noticed, maybe. Of course it was assumed that the organization actually bought the stuff. But if one violin lost his original and photocopied the next guy’s that was not an issue. I suspect that copyright care at the very highest levels of professional performance are probably like font licenses in design firms/ad agencies. When there is big money, you keep your nose very clean about the small stuff.
If a composer thought a major orchestra was performing his piece without having, in effect, licensed the performance, THAT would be a scandal.
Pete 04.30.08 at 9:09 am
LARGE PRINT: this is one of those things that is technically trivial but prevented by tedious licensing issues.
Dave 04.30.08 at 9:43 am
@8: “‘Right-to-housing’ dystopia about a place where you do not actually own your house, and you cannot sublet it without telling the owner, and where the government knows exactly where you live, and companies use that information to send you junk mail and people feel queasy about strangers staying in their houses etc. etc.”
Which parts of that aren’t substantially true, in a significant number of jurisdictions? Or are you just being ironic?
Ginger Yellow 04.30.08 at 12:32 pm
JH: I actually meant that Audible’s prices are only a bit below the CD versions, at least for stuff I’m interested in. For instance, Amazon charges £8 for each CD of the radio version of H2G2, while Audible charges £9. I picked up the collected edition at a bookshop for £50. That’s insane.
Matt Weiner 04.30.08 at 1:45 pm
Dave @20 on right to housing dystopias; I think the point is that it all is true, and we don’t find it objectionable; we’re willing to trade off some of our rights over the place where we live for lower housing costs; so maybe we shouldn’t be so appalled at the idea that we may be asked to trade off some of our rights over our books/music in exchange for lower housing costs.
I suspect that the analogy breaks down pretty badly over the excludability issue. No one else can live in my apartment while I’m here, and my landlords expect to get it back when I’m done with it and rent it to someone else. (This also has obvious bearing on why I feel queasy about others staying in my house.) But digital media in principle can be shared without making them unavailable to the person who has them, and even with physical books and CDs the original manufacturer isn’t expecting them back when I’m done with them. (Pace Holbo’s last link.) So they don’t have the continued interest in the actual thing I have that the landlord has in my apartment. I think that’s also why people don’t find the restrictions inherent in libraries/video stores/Netflix particularly creepy, because those folks are expecting their product back so they can reuse it.
None of which is to say that there might be good reason to deal with some DRM for a substantial discount, and I think that’s mostly what zamfir was saying. But I don’t think we can build a normative case that this is OK by an analogy to housing.
(Also on the subject of MP3s: isn’t part of the issue that they’re inferior sound quality?)
lemuel pitkin 04.30.08 at 1:59 pm
I suspect that the analogy breaks down pretty badly over the excludability issue.
Well yes. You *can* set up a massive legal and technological roadblocks to reproducing information to make it just as costly and difficult as reproducing physical goods. “I have to pay every time I want to see a band perform live, so why shouldn’t I pay every time I listen to a recording? It’s impossible to lend a friend a paper book while keeping a copy for myself, so why should I be able to do that with an electronic book?” Etc.
The point is, first, that’s deliberately eliminating much of the beneift of information technology in order to allow a few businesses to remain profitable under their old business model. And second, in practice, doing so requires a lot of intrusive surveillance. What if landlords insisted on installing cameras in every room of rental housing to make sure there were no illegal sublets?
Jon H 04.30.08 at 4:53 pm
John wrote: “Yes, but what struck me was that the passage seemed to emphasize that the badness of losing an authorization was something over and above the badness of someone else just plain listening to your music.”
Well, it is, if you want to use that authorization on another computer.
If the point was just to keep other people from listening to your music, they’d probably advise you to *delete* the music. As it stands, they don’t seem to have a position on ripping all your CDs into iTunes and then giving away the computer they’re on.
(Also, a computer has to be authorized in order to listen to iTunes store music that is only streamed from another computer. So the old computer might not even have any DRM media files on it, even though it’s authorized.)
There’s a way to deauthorize all machines in one fell swoop, actually, so it’s not like losing an authorized machine will be a permanent loss. But it is a bit of a hassle. Getting that ‘You’ve used up your 5 authorizations’ message when you try to do something on a computer is a bit of a buzzkill, especially when you can’t easily access other the computers to deauthorize a particular machine that isn’t needed anymore.
Worst-case scenario, of course, would be if you gave away an authorized machine and it also had your iTunes account login information stored, so the new owner could buy stuff on your credit card. Deauthorizing the machine ought to at least ensure that doesn’t happen.
jholbo 04.30.08 at 5:22 pm
jon h, I think Apple has actually improved their deauthorization system. You can just go into your account, see your list of machines and delete one. No muss, no fuss. I think that’s right. (It used to be hard, I know.)
Again, I don’t find it mysterious that Apple would recommend that you deauthorize your old machine. I just find it peculiar that they would encourage you to think that someone listening to your files was a ‘bad’ above and beyond the loss of your authorization.
Great Zamfir 05.01.08 at 8:44 am
There is of course a point were the housing-books analogy fails, but I think the analogy holds for a large part of the right-to-read story.
As a student I have seen quite some moves that do resemble the mp3 vs DRM struggle. The Dutch government gives higher allowances to people living on their own tahn to people living with their parents, so some people stay with their parents but register themselves elsewhere, usually with family. The organization giving the allowances knows this happens, so they do check al records they can get their hands on to see wher you are really living. Of course not to videocamera level, but they do check your health insurance etc.
The other way round also exists: people on benefits wwho were letting rooms would allow the student to register at that address, since the extra income from letting would make them entitled to lower benefits. Resulting, of course, in students doing the ‘register with family member’ trick.
A last one: I was subrenting a room in England for some time, but the others hadn’t told their landlord (landlady?). So when she came to repair something and generally check out the house, I would go the city for a few hours and return when she was gone. It reminded me of the trouble people would go through to get Service Pack 2 on their illegal Windows versions.
Great Zamfir 05.01.08 at 8:46 am
That should be “people on benefits who were letting rooms would NOT allow the student to register at that address.
What happened to the preview that used to be below?
abb1 05.01.08 at 9:20 am
Samizdat! Fight the power!
Matt Weiner 05.01.08 at 2:25 pm
OK, zamfir, this sounds like a difference between Holland and the US — here middle-class folk like myself don’t usually get benefits based on where we live, so there’s no one looking over our shoulder. And my friends who’ve worked in public housing say there are issues there about checking on the income of residents, and to some extent monitoring who lives there (though it sounded like this was very far from cameras in every room — wasn’t enough resources to check very aggressively).
But it seems as though in your case the people doing the checking are the government who are dispensing benefits based on residence, not the landlords, which is a disanalogy to the DRM case. I think that unauthorized subletters absenting themselves when the landlord comes over happens here too, but there at least the landlord is actually doing repairs — it seems as though DRM here involves the company doing surveillance without actually doing much to upgrade your service.
richard 05.02.08 at 2:19 pm
To extend the welfare fraud/kindle TOS analogy, do the landlords and/or house builders come in unannounced and rifle through the renters bookshelves, record collections and post, looking for items that they themselves did not supply? Do they bring eviction notices with them, just in case they find some bit of information in the house that they do not approve of?
I’m now undecided about the first sale vs. cheaper service question – although I think the general bias should be against taking away a user’s rights to the data used – but the Kindle terms as written seem to hold the door open for all kinds of abuse.
paul 05.02.08 at 5:34 pm
Uh, maybe I’m beating this to death, but with the exception of the recent housing bubble in the US (and a few other, similar places and times) renting hasn’t necessarily been cheaper than buying, given that almost everyone buys with a mortgage. Pre-bubble it was not at all uncommon that the after-tax cost of purchasing a house (for some definition of purchasing that included the bank having a substantial claim) was lower than the after-tax cost of renting. Instead, rental has been about mobility, risk-sharing, access to capital markets, stickiness of large transactions, blah blah blah.
Which also gets us to a lot of questions about ebooks and other digital content. Given the DRM, the fragility of computer hardware and digital data formats, questions about the longevity of the companies and business models, lousy interfaces for buying things (not to mention reading or playing them) and so forth, the value of ebooks is rather significantly less. DRM makes things worse than no DRM, but even without it I get a sense that I’m ultimately renting the work rather than purchasing it permanently. And I don’t get to go down to one of several local bookstores, chat with the staff and customers, and generally have a good time.
As a result, for the time being I’ve limited myself to Gutenberg and a few other zero-dollar-cost purveyors, because that’s worth the hassle of navigating the interface, and if something goes south I can just download the same work again.
Gordon Rogers 05.02.08 at 6:10 pm
Perhaps the growing availability of free content (Gutenberg, Wikibooks, etc,) will eventually exert a degree of downward pricing pressure on the textbook publishing cartel. Students are notorious for their ability to ferret out free content, and the open source movement will only accelerate this trend. As an example, a start-up in the U.S. called Flatworld Knowledge is developing free, open-source, online college textbooks (ad-free as well). There will no doubt be others. The market will drive the price down as students (and professors who are not part of the cartel) ask themselves: “Why should I pay $75 for a European History textbook, for a 15 week course, when I can download a free one?” For a look at the future of Pearson, Prentice Hall et al, take a look at Kodak, EMI, and other 20th century stalwarts of the analogue world. They’re a fraction of their former size and market cap.
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