Tag Archives: DRM

Macmillan vs Amazon, Round One

According to Huffington Post, after the iPad launch Walter Mossberg cornered Steve Jobs to ask a pertinent question:

Mossberg asks why users would want to shell out $14.99 for an ebook on the iPad, when they can buy ebooks for Amazon’s Kindle for $9.99.

Steve Jobs’ retort: ‘Well, that won’t be the case.’ Mossberg presses him on whether that means Apple’s prices will go down, or Amazon’s will go up, to which Jobs offers a cryptic, non-committal, ‘The prices will be the same.’

On Friday, this exchange was explained. Macmillan demanded that Amazon jack up the prices of e-books to $14.99. In response, Amazon stopped selling Macmillan books. That includes all books from Tor and Forge, the science fiction and fantasy publishers.

As it happens, next month’s book at the book club I go to is published by Tor. I went to buy a copy on Friday, not knowing about the dispute. I had seen it available for Kindle before, and wondered why it was no longer available.

Then I shrugged, and bought a dirt-cheap used paperback copy instead. If Amazon had given in and upped the price to over $10, rather than refusing to sell it, I’d have done the same.

The thing is, a book is something I rarely read more than once. There are so many good books out there, I feel like it would be crazy to re-read when I could read something new to me. Hence $15 for a book is expensive entertainment, compared to $15 for a CD I’ll listen to many times, or $3 for a movie rental.

I suspect that I’m not unusual in this respect, and that Amazon have done the market research, and concluded that DRM-crippled e-books are never going to sell for more than $10–particularly not when you can pick up a paperback for $5 including shipping. Rather than devalue the Kindle and allow other publishers leverage to introduce their own disastrous price increases, Amazon is playing hardball and opting not to sell Macmillan books–which is their right in a free market, isn’t it?

Apple did the same thing with the music industry, pushing them to keep prices at 99¢ per track. Later, the big music companies were allowed to increase prices in return for dropping DRM. Everyone loved it when Apple forced prices down, but this time there are some angry voices.

John Scalzi is one of them. He’s pretty angry at Amazon. Reading between the lines, I think he’s pretty angry at his publisher too, for trying to sell his books at a price he doesn’t think most people will buy at. Meanwhile, Cory Doctorow proposes the iTunes Music Store solution: allow publishers the freedom to set prices however they like, if they drop DRM and abusive EULAs. (Sounds good to me, as it makes the problem somewhat self-correcting–if publishers jack up the prices too high for the market, copyright violation ensues.)

I can understand why Macmillan’s authors are upset by what Amazon have done, but fundamentally, I think this is a very simple problem: Macmillan has decided to set its prices higher than Amazon thinks it can sell books at, so Amazon is choosing not to sell Macmillan books. If you’re an author published by Macmillan, I think the people you really need to be directing your ire at are at your publishing company, for attempting to raise prices in the middle of a terrible recession. In the mean time, well, I guess I’ll buy your books used.

Kindle and Amazon and the DMCA

Amazon have misused the DMCA to demand takedown of a file called azw-0.1.zip. Since I have both the archive file and a Kindle, and have used both together, I can explain what’s really going on. Hopefully this will clear up some of the misinformation floating around.

The code in the disputed zip file is written in Python. It calculates the Mobipocket PID for your Kindle, based on the serial number written on the back. You can then provide this PID to any e-book store that sells e-books in DRMed Mobipocket format. They can sell you encrypted Mobipocket e-books, and you can then run a second Python script which flips a flag in the e-book file, making it readable on your Kindle. (The flag is just one that says “This is encrypted for Kindle”; no encryption is broken.)

This works because Amazon bought Mobipocket a few years ago, and used their DRM scheme and e-book format as the basis of the Kindle’s e-book format. The basic Mobipocket format is pretty simple. It’s HTML inside a Palm OS PDB database. That’s it. The DRM just adds a layer of encryption.

So, why are Amazon upset about this?

One theory is that they don’t want Kindle owners buying books anywhere other than Amazon.com. Well, if that’s the case, they’re playing a losing game, because Fictionwise (recently purchased by Barnes & Noble) sells e-books in DRM-free Mobipocket format, which you can just drag-drop onto your Kindle.

A second theory is that Amazon don’t want people to be able to create DRM-encumbered e-books for Kindle themselves, bypassing whatever fees Amazon may be charging for the service. I don’t know how true that may be, as I have no interest in creating DRM-encumbered anything, so I’ve never investigated how much Amazon charges.

My personal theory is that the real reason Amazon don’t want people finding out their Kindle’s Mobipocket PID is a fear that people will then find out how to decrypt their DRM-encumbered Mobipocket books.

And indeed, there is a completely different set of Python scripts floating around on the web that will decrypt a Mobipocket e-book given the PID used to encrypt it. This shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone; DRM is fundamentally flawed. Clearly the e-book reader software has to have all the information necessary to decrypt the book so that it can show it to me. That being the case, it’s inevitable that the decryption code will be reverse-engineered if enough people are motivated enough to do so.

But make no mistake: the azw-0.1 files do not break any copy protection or reveal any secret codes. They just calculate the PID of your Kindle, based on the serial number that’s written right on the back of the device in plain sight. They are interoperability tools, and the DMCA explicitly allows for interoperability tools. I suspect that the EFF could take on this case and win easily.

While I’m writing, here’s a quick summary of a few Kindle myths that I see repeated a lot in coverage of the story:

  • The Kindle traps you into buying everything from Amazon.

    Not true. Even if the azw scripts were illegal, you could still buy as much DRM-free content as you liked, load it directly onto the Kindle via USB, and never use the wireless connection to Amazon at all. As mentioned above, you can buy DRM-free e-books in Kindle-ready Mobipocket files from Fictionwise.

    It’s like the iPod: you may be stuck with a single vendor for DRM-encumbered content, but you can buy your DRM-free content from anywhere. Personally, I intend to buy as little DRM-crippled content as possible, and hope that Amazon gets the message.

  • The Kindle uses proprietary e-book format.

    As mentioned above, the Kindle’s native format is a trivial variation on Mobipocket format, which is HTML inside a Palm PDB database. The open-source mobiperl tools will pack and unpack .mobi and .azw files.

    As Mobipocket’s FAQ points out, the HTML extensions and metadata are based on an open industry standard.

    Also, there are free tools from Mobipocket for creating e-books. They’re Windows-only, however, and don’t seem to work under WINE.

  • You have to get all your content onto your Kindle by sending it to Amazon.

    Wrong. The Kindle mounts as a hard drive, using Storage Class USB. No drivers are required on Windows, Mac or Linux. Your library of books appears in a folder called “documents”. They’re just .azw and .mobi files. You can drag more books into the folder in Mobipocket or ISO-8859-1 text format, and the Kindle will display them.

    If you want to read PDFs, you have three options. One is to e-mail the PDF to your Amazon Kindle e-mail address; Amazon will convert it and it will appear wirelessly on your Kindle, at a cost of 10 cents. The second option is to e-mail the PDF to your free Kindle conversion e-mail address, and have Amazon e-mail it back in mobi/azw format for you to load onto your Kindle via USB. The third option is to use free tools to convert the PDF to mobi yourself, in which case Amazon need never see what’s in your PDF.

    From my own experiments, it appears that Amazon are using the open source pdf2edit on their back end as the conversion tool. Either that, or they’re using something which has exactly the same formatting conversion quirks.

Letter to the FTC 539814-00408

This is a copy of my comments to the Federal Trade Commission, who are asking for comments on DRM technologies for a Town Hall Meeting in March.

As you are doubtless aware, the Copyright Act of 1976 codifies the First-Sale Doctrine. This states that a purchaser of a copyright work has the legal right to sell or give away the copy, once it has been obtained–so long as no additional copies have been made.

One major issue I have with DRM technologies is that they deny the customer his legal right to resell the product on the second hand market. Also, in many cases purchased products may evaporate if the DRM provider goes out of business, yet still these products are described as being sold to the customer, with words like "buy", "purchase" and "on sale" being used.

Netflix will let me keep a movie indefinitely, but I can’t sell the disc, and they reserve the right to demand it back. Similarly, iTunes digital movies can be kept indefinitely, but I can’t sell the movie, and Apple can turn off my access to it, analogous to demanding the disc back. Netflix describe their service honestly, as rental. Apple describe their service as purchase, with the button saying "Buy now".

This seems to me to be confusing. Physical video stores like Blockbuster would not be allowed to say "Buy this movie for $3.89!" when the terms were actually rental with no due date for return, so I don’t understand why digital movie rentals are treated differently.

I have a simple proposal. It should be illegal to describe something as being "sold" or "for sale" unless the corresponding right of resale is available to the purchaser. Instead, a phrase such as "indefinite rental" should be used, as that’s what is really being offered.

In other words, when I "buy" a movie from the PS3 online store, I’m not really buying it, because I can’t resell it second hand when I’m done with it. So Sony should not be able to pretend I’m buying it; they should be legally required to describe the offering accurately, as an "indefinite rental".

I think this would go a long way towards making it clear to the average consumer that their DRM-protected purchased content comes with metaphorical strings attached, and that it might go away one day.

Kindle

Dear Amazon,

You’re so almost there with your new Kindle e-book. There are just a few minor details you need to fix to get me on board.

First of all, you need Mac support, and preferably Linux support as well, both for content creation and for reading books. There’s really no excuse for not having reader support, as you have a working Mobipocket reader in Java that will run on Mac and Linux, you just haven’t taken the time to package it up properly. The creation tools ought to be a pretty simple task to port too; a command line version would be fine. I don’t even care if it can’t apply DRM; I just want a way to be able to package up free text.

Secondly, you need to either drop the DRM, or drop the price of the books. Let’s consider a real example here. I’m about to start reading Charlie Stross’s The Atrocity Archives.

Let’s get one thing straight here: because there’s DRM, I can’t sell the book when I’m done with it, which breaks the first sale doctrine. Therefore, you’re not actually selling e-books, you’re renting them to me for an indefinite period of time, a bit like Netflix does with DVDs. I’d respect you more if you admitted that.

Anyhow, If I go the Kindle route, it’s $9.99 for the book.

Suppose I go the paper route instead. I can pick up a new copy on amazon.com marketplace for $12 plus $4 shipping = $16. When I’m done reading it, I can sell it for $9 second hand. Total cost to me = $7.

So the Kindle is more expensive, and I can’t actually buy the books. That to me is a poor deal.

Oh, sure, Kindle prices include network bandwidth… but with paper books, I had to include the cost of physically shipping dead tree across the country, and I still came out ahead. If you can’t beat the paper book price-per-reading, you’re doing something seriously wrong.

We’ve all watched the music industry flail around overcharging for DRM-burdened files and get nowhere. Learn from their mistakes. Drop the DRM, or drop the book prices to $5 or so (comparable to a DVD or video game rental, plus some markup to cover network costs) and I’ll order my Kindle tomorrow.

Update: Of course, if you gave me the Kindle for free, I’d use it to buy books from you, and look on the extra cost as a convenience fee.

secdrv.sys

For the last 6 years, Microsoft has been quietly shipping Macrovision DRM software embedded in Windows, in order to “increase compatibility and playability” of video games.

Unfortunately, there’s a bug in the DRM code which allows privilege escalation. So Windows boxes are now being pwned across the Internet.

The best part: this video game DRM has been shipping in Windows Server 2003. Yeah, I bet lots of people need video game compatibility on Windows Server.

Oh, and Microsoft worked with Macrovision to fix the security holes in the Vista version of the DRM code—but they didn’t bother to fix the XP version. Classy.

Say goodbye to DRM

Today’s the big day. The iTunes Music Store has started actually selling DRM-free music. I decided to vote with my wallet and go find and buy something. I’m hoping that in a few weeks we’ll see a press release stating that EMI’s music sales tripled, or something like that, and the other labels will get that clue they’ve been missing.

Unfortunately, it seems as if everyone else has had the same idea, and Apple’s Internet connections anre buckling under the strain. In a way that’s a good thing, but it’s a bit frustrating.

Dear Steve Jobs

I’ll keep this brief, as you’re a busy man.

You recently wrote that you would drop DRM from the iTunes music store “in a heartbeat” if you could.

Well, as you’ll see if you check the iTunes purchase logs, I bought quite a few tunes from the iTunes music store. You’ll notice that I stopped as soon as you fixed the flaw that allowed Hymn to remove the DRM. Since then I’ve bought music from places like bleep.com that sell DRM-free music. I still use the iTunes music store, but only as an easy way to preview tracks that I then buy elsewhere.

Clearly, there are plenty of music labels (such as most indie labels) that are willing to license their music DRM-free. Clearly there are people like me who won’t buy music if it has DRM they can’t remove. So, here’s a proposal:

Allow record companies and artists who elect to do so, to sell their music DRM-free on the iTunes music store. Indicate the DRM status with a small icon in the download views in iTunes, like you indicate explicit lyrics. I’ve put together a quick mock-up. As you can see, the padlock icon is very discreet and unobjectionable. I don’t think it would cause user confusion; the people who don’t care about DRM will probably never notice it.

Once you’ve offered DRM-free music on the iTunes store, you just sit back and watch. If I’m right, the non-DRM music sales will surge. Then you’ll have some real ammo with which to approach the major labels. Because frankly, they don’t listen to consumers like me. I know, because this year I wrote to EMI listing a bunch of CDs I didn’t buy because they had DRM warnings on the packaging. I didn’t even get a reply.

Yours sincerely,

mathew