worship the glitch

This is Eric Mortensen's blog. He works @ Blip and lives in Brooklyn.

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Mac DVD Player patch allows skipping of trailers, warnings, ads, etc. →

Alfredo Daniel Rezinovsky (CC BY-SA)

And if one of the five titans that control almost all of publishing gets into a scrap with one of the four or five titans that control almost all ebook publishing, or the one company that rules the audiobook market, the collateral damage is that you will have to choose to eschew a gigantic slice of all the literature ever made in order to hang on to your library, or abandon your library in order to get access to that publisher’s work. Or fill your shoulderbag with a half-dozen tablets and readers, one for each permutation of which corporate elephant is trying to crush another.

Cory Doctorow | Amazon and Macmillan go to war: readers and writers are the civilian casualties

Petition demands that Amazon drop DRM from the Kindle →

vruz:

—via Free Software Foundation, ht: Groklaw

The Free Software Foundation’s DefectiveByDesign.org campaign, supported by prominent authors, journalists, and librarians, has launched a petition against the Amazon Kindle’s use of digital restrictions management (DRM).

“The freedom to read without supervision or interference is central to a free society,” said FSF executive director Peter Brown. “When ebook products like the Kindle use DRM to restrict what users can do with their books, that is a clear threat to the free exchange of ideas.”

Signatories to the petition include prominent academic and industry names like Creative Commons and Change Congress co-founder Lawrence Lessig; author, poet and MacArthur Fellow Lewis Hyde; Harvard Law Professor and Vice Dean for Library and Information Resources John Palfrey; and Christopher Hayes, Washington, DC editor for *The Nation*. The petition, published here, is now open for others to add their signatures as well.

“The level of control Amazon has over their ebooks conflicts with basic freedoms that we take for granted,” said Palfrey. “In a future where books are sold with digital restrictions, it will be impossible for libraries to guarantee free access to human knowledge.”

[PJ notes: Also signers include Cory Doctorow, Ben Klemens, Richard Stallman, and Clay Shirky.]

I think Amazon would gladly do this, but the existing publishing industry will never let it happen. We’ll have DRM-free ebooks when a modern publishing industry rises up and replaces the old one. We should sign the petition, but we should follow up by buying a book from a DRM-free publisher. Does such a publisher exist?