Should I Own The eBooks I Buy?

If you buy a physical book at Barnes & Noble, you don’t have to go back to your local Barnes & Noble to read it. This is why I buy most of my books via Humble Bundle’s deals and then only in PDF form without DRM (Digital Rights Management aka encrypted in such a way that you can only read them with an authorized reader program).

It’s not that I hate Kindle, but for a while its desktop and mobile versions wouldn’t sync my collections. It would sync the individual books, but not the categories I’d come up with to organize them the way I want. This has since been improved, but in the meantime, I moved all my non-Kindle books (hundreds of them) to the Apple Books app. With iCloud, my books and the way I organize them sync on my laptop, tablet, and phone.

I know, supposedly Calibre can decrypt Kindle files that, but it requires some wonky plugins that can take a while to get to work, if you can get them to work. Furthermore… it’s illegal.

Fair Use?

Were I to convert my DRMed Kindle books to non-DRMed PDFs, they’d be copies for personal use only and should fall under the fair use exceptions in copyright law, but the act of decrypting them is not legal. Tons of people do it because they believe their intended fair use makes it too weak a crime to be worth prosecuting.

Meanwhile, you can copy your unencrypted-but-copyrighted music files if it’s for backup/archival purposes for personal use. Copying your mp3 collection from your computer to your phone is legal. Decrypting your Kindle book so you can read it with a different app… criminal.

I had to become a criminal and break Amazon’s video encryption during COVID… so I could do my job at Amazon. I had to stream on Twitch from home about creating Alexa skills, including ones with visual components. Originally my team set up cameras pointed at screened Alexa devices, but the sound would shake the cameras, causing constant blurring and refocusing. If we connected an Amazon Fire Cube to an HDMI adapter, we could pipe the video of it running Alexa skills from the Fire Cube into our broadcast software.

Its output was HDCP encrypted, however. Therefore we figured out how to use an HDMI splitter with HDCP decryption in it to send an unencrypted video signal from the Fire Cube to the broadcast software. We only used this to run Alexa skills, but we could have used it to make high quality duplicates of movies on Amazon Prime Video, Netflix, or any other app on the Fire Cube. We didn’t.

DRM and Subscription vs Purchase

I do understand the challenge of putting out DRM-free content. It can be easily pirated (instead of being mildly difficult to pirate) and I’m more inclined to think the lock-in is only part Amazon and part that publishers require DRM to be on Amazon’s platform. But here’s the thing… if I buy an album of songs for $10 from Amazon, I get DRM-free MP3 format files I can use in any player.

There’s the difference between a subscription and a purchase… If I download Netflix videos for offline play on my mobile device, I have to use the Netflix app to watch them because they’re part of a subscription. If I cancel the subscription, Netflix needs a way to disable the content. I get that. I’d also get that for books “borrowed” through Overdrive (used by libraries) or Kindle Unlimited. But shouldn’t I own stuff I buy?

We’ve been having this debate for a long time because of overly complex EULAs for both software and devices. I boycotted Apple for 10 years over the way you had to risk bricking your device to gain root and “jailbreak” it. I can replace Windows with Linux on just about any PC I buy. I can even force many Macs to boot into Linux instead of MacOS. I once completely erased MacOS from an Intel-powered MacBook air and replaced it with Linux (bit more difficult with Apple Silicon Macs, though Asahi Linux is working on it). Trying to replace the manufacturer’s chosen OS on a tablet or phone can be next to impossible, risks bricking it, or both.

Using NFTs as DRM?

Let’s extend this to NFTs: a unique token that says your copy of a digital file is a certified original or “1 of x” in a limited series. People got confused:

1. They thought the NFT included the file as part of it. The NFT and the file are separate things. You can lose the actual file, have no way to get a new copy, but still have the NFT.

2. They’d ask what good the NFT is if someone could copy the file off a webpage. That person wouldn’t have the accompanying “certificate of authenticity” (COA) represented by the NFT.

I thought that might actually be a good method for DRM. But with blockchain tokens, whether they represent a crypto coin or an NFT, the benefit and problem are that they’re virtually anonymous (which is why cryptocurrency is so popular with cybercriminals). If you have the token, it’s yours. If someone hacks you, steals and then wipes the token from your files, and you don’t have a backup… now it’s theirs. Ensuring the person with the token is the licensed owner of the token is more difficult.

Is Copyright Right?

The first time an old blog got “slashdotted” (a huge rush of traffic because a link to your site appeared in a story on a very popular tech news forum) was when I advocated for fixing copyright instead of tearing it down in the face of abuses of the law.

As an author and artist, I’m all about protecting my rights to profit from what I make and have some semblance of control over its use and distribution. I’m planning to open-source an app next month (to be written about in a few upcoming blog posts) and I’m using a very permissive license. But that’s my choice. If someone redistributed my source code without a license to do so, it would be illegal. But as the copyright holder, I have the option to go “yeah, use it how you like.” I also have the option of saying “this work is personal to me, I spent a lot of time on it, and if you want it, you have to pay me.”

The U.S. Constitution, in Article I, Section 8, Clause 8, authorizes Congress to “promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.” Copyrights and patents are meant to encourage people to create and share new stuff by giving them an exclusive right to them, which they can license, “for limited Times.” When that limited time period ends, the work enters the public domain and is available to anyone to copy, modify, perform, broadcast, etc.

When the first law establishing copyright in the US was enacted in 1790, the term of copyright was 14 years. It took 41 years before it was extended to 28. Then, 78 years later it was extended by allowing a 28 year renewal on top of the original 28. Thanks to additional treaties and laws, it’s now the life of the author plus 70 years. If I live to 90, that would put my copyrighted works in the public domain over 100 years from now. Do I think I should profit for a limited term? Yes. Do I think my great grandchildren should be suing people for performing one of my songs without a license 30 years after I’m dead? In my mind, that’s ridiculous.

Back to DRM

The argument for DRM is that it’s difficult to photocopy, collate, and bind a printed book and extremely difficult to do so with perfect fidelity to the original, but copying a digital book takes a fraction of a second to create a perfect replica. I get that. But all these laws making it illegal to break encryption on a copy of a work you bought are not only nibbling away at the concept of fair use, but I believe they are backdoor nibbling away at the concept of ownership.

Think about the growing trend of having to pay a subscription fee to use something you bought. I understand this being the case for something you buy specifically to be able to access the subscription service, like a Bloomberg terminal. But BMW took huge flack in 2023 by trying to make BMW owners pay a monthly fee to use their seat warmers. Who buys a $50,000 car just so they can warm their butt for $18 a month?

Imagine if a rapist could follow a woman through a parking structure and remotely disable not only her car’s starter, but its security, by hacking the mechanisms intended to disable those features for non-payment. Frightening, but becoming more possible every day.

A centralized DRM clearinghouse is possible, but right now working with one is voluntary. For example, Movies Anywhere lets you connect your Amazon, Comcast, Google Play, and Apple TV accounts so that a movie you buy via one becomes available to you on them all. Warner, Universal, Sony, and Disney support it. My purchased streaming movies from the MCU I bought from Amazon are available through Google and Apple too.

It’s possible, but it’s voluntary. I don’t like government overreach, but if we don’t push our “leaders” to pass laws requiring this kind of DRM interoperability for purchased content, we’ll be paying monthly fees to access our own purchased libraries sooner rather than later. I should own the electronic media I buy, at least in terms of making it portable and making backups, without subscription fees. We cannot let “Big IP” continue to chip away at our ownership rights, and I say this as a creator who values copyright and the moral rights defined in the Berne Convention. No publisher should be able to introduce a format and then claim it’s exempt from fair use… Not Amazon, not Sony (who secretly installed malware on people’s computers to protect its DRM), not anyone.