DRM isn’t my favorite technology. But publishers deserve the right to have it, as long as consumers know what’s going on, so the laws of the marketplace can apply.
That’s my stand and Jon Noring’s when it comes to OpenReader. We’d like an appropriate DRM approach to emerge in time–with the needs of consumers, librarians and others in mind, too.
And judging from a just-published ZDNet article, none other than Linus Torvalds most likely would agree with us. If anything, in fact, his views may be stronger than ours. Meanwhile here’s how ZDnet quotes him on an anti-DRM GPL draft:
The current GPLv3 draft pretty clearly says that Red Hat would have to distribute their private keys, so that anybody can sign their own versions of the modules they recompile, in order to re-create their own versions of the signed binaries that Red Hat creates. That’s insane.
Related: If:book‘s sensible concerns over DRM’s future threats to libraries. The publishing world must address them.
What Torvalds is talking about is not DRM in terms of copy protection, but in being able to validate the publisher of a given work. In the computer world that can be critical, as malicious code will often try to disguise itself as something you legitimately want, and like any other con game being able to pass itself off as a trusted source is key to getting people to take the bait.
Torvalds has always been pragmatic if nothing else, and is not the idealogue that some in the OSS community want to paint him as.
In the future, perhaps e-book authors would use a private key to create a digital signature that validates a given work as authoritative; could we then tie that signature to a micropayments mechanism so that the consumer could ensure the author actually gets any payment made for a work? I’m not sure of the answer, but it is an interesting idea.
Thanks for your comments, Richard. In the past, at least as I recall, Torvalds has talked about DRM in a broader context that could include copy-protection–I hope I’ll have time to track down that quote. At any rate, as a pragmatist, I suspect he’d care about distribution of modern books, including such classics as The Great Gatsby. Right now publishers are most shy about releasing them without DRM. I doubt this will change soon, alas. So, as I continue to see it, the solution is a gentler kind of DRM that is easier on readers than the current varieties and also avoids Microsoft-style chokeholds. – David
I posted my reply at the Copyfight blog.
“Torvalds […] is not the idealogue that some in the OSS community want to paint him as.”
The OSS community does not talk about ideology. The FS community does, but Torvalds is not part of that community, so I doubt they give much thought to his perceived lack of ideology. So who are these people who paint Torvalds an ideologue?