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ebooks-must-increase-freedom.html (10306B)

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 <title>E-books must increase our freedom, not decrease it
 - GNU Project - Free Software Foundation</title>
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 <h2>E-books must increase our freedom, not decrease it</h2>
 
 <address class="byline">by <a href="https://www.stallman.org/">Richard
 Stallman</a></address>
 
 <p>I love The Jehovah Contract, and I'd like everyone else to love it
 too. I have lent it out at least six times over the years. Printed
 books let us do that.</p>
 
 <p>I couldn't do that with most commercial e-books. It's &ldquo;not allowed.&rdquo;
 And if I tried to disobey, the software in e-readers has malicious
 features called Digital Restrictions Management (DRM, for short) to restrict reading,
 so it simply won't work. The e-books are encrypted so that only
 proprietary software with malicious functionality can display them.</p>
 
 <p>Many other habits that we readers are accustomed to are &ldquo;not
 allowed&rdquo; for e-books. With the Amazon &ldquo;Kindle&rdquo; (for which <a href="/philosophy/why-call-it-the-swindle.html">&ldquo;Swindle&rdquo;</a>
 is a more fitting name), to take one example,
 users can't buy a book anonymously with cash. &ldquo;Kindle&rdquo; books are
 typically available from Amazon only, and Amazon makes users identify
 themselves. Thus, Amazon knows exactly which books each user has
 read. In a country such as the UK, where you can be <a
 href="https://www.stallman.org/archives/2012-mar-jun.html#07_April_2012_%28Wrong_book%29">prosecuted for
 possessing a forbidden book</a>, this is more than hypothetically
 Orwellian.</p>
 
 <p>Furthermore, you can't sell the e-book after you read it (if Amazon has its way,
 the used book stores where I have passed many an afternoon will be
 history). You can't give it to a friend either, because according to
 Amazon you never really owned it. Amazon requires users to sign an
 End-User License Agreement (&ldquo;EULA&rdquo;) which says so.</p>
 
 <p>You can't even be sure it will still be in your machine tomorrow.
 People reading 1984 in the &ldquo;Kindle&rdquo; had an Orwellian experience: their
 e-books vanished right before their eyes, as Amazon used a malicious
 software feature called a &ldquo;back door&rdquo; to remotely delete them
 (virtual book-burning; is that what &ldquo;Kindle&rdquo; means?). But don't worry;
 Amazon promised never to do this again, except by order of the state.</p>
 
 <p>With software, either the users control the program (making such software <a
 href="/philosophy/free-sw.html">Libre or Free</a>)
 or the program controls its users (non-Libre). Amazon's e-book
 policies imitate the distribution policies of non-Libre software, but
 that's not the only relationship between the two. The
 <a href="/proprietary/proprietary.html">malicious
 software features</a> described above are imposed on users via software
 that's not Libre. If a Libre program had malicious features like
 those, some users skilled at programming would remove them, then
 provide the corrected version to all the other users. Users can't
 change non-Libre software, which makes it <a
 href="https://bostonreview.net/forum_response/root-problem-software-controlled-its-developer/">
 an ideal instrument for exercising power over the public</a>.</p>
 
 <p>Any one of these encroachments on our freedom is reason aplenty to say
 no. If these policies were limited to Amazon, we'd bypass them, but
 the other e-book dealers' policies are roughly similar.</p>
 
 <div class="announcement comment" role="complementary">
 <hr class="no-display" />
 <p><a href="https://www.defectivebydesign.org/ebooks.html">Join our mailing list
 about the dangers of eBooks</a>.</p>
 <hr class="no-display" />
 </div>
 
 <p>What worries me most is the prospect of losing the option of printed
 books. The Guardian has announced &ldquo;digital-only reads&rdquo;: in other
 words, books available only at the price of freedom. I will not read
 any book at that price. Five years from now, will unauthorized copies
 be the only ethically acceptable copies for most books?</p>
 
 <p>It doesn't have to be that way. With anonymous payment on the
 Internet, paying for downloads of non-DRM non-EULA e-books would
 respect our freedom. Physical stores could sell such e-books for
 cash, like digital music on CDs&mdash;still available even though the
 music industry is aggressively pushing DRM-restrictive services such
 as Spotify. Physical CD stores face the burden of an expensive
 inventory, but physical e-book stores could write copies onto your USB
 memory stick, the only inventory being memory sticks to sell if you
 need.</p>
 
 <p>The reason publishers give for their restrictive e-books practices is to stop
 people from sharing copies. They say this is for the sake of the
 authors; but even if it did serve the authors' interests (which for
 quite famous authors it may), it could not justify DRM, EULAs or the Digital
 Economy Act which persecutes readers for sharing.
 In practice, the copyright system does a bad job of supporting authors
 aside from the most popular ones. Other authors' principal interest is to be better
 known, so sharing their work benefits them as well as readers. Why not switch to a
 system that does the job better and is compatible with sharing?</p>
 
 <p>A tax on memories and Internet connectivity, along the general lines
 of what most EU countries do, could do the job well if three points
 are got right. The money should be collected by the state and
 distributed according to law, not given to a private collecting
 society; it should be divided among all authors, and we mustn’t let
 companies take any of it from them; and the distribution of money
 should be based on a sliding scale, not in linear proportion to
 popularity. I suggest using the cube root of each author's
 popularity: if A is eight times as popular as B, A gets twice B's
 amount (not eight times B's amount). This would support many fairly
 popular writers adequately instead of making a few stars richer.</p>
 
 <p>Another system is to give each e-reader a button to send some small
 sum (perhaps 25 pence in the UK) to the author.</p>
 
 <p>Sharing is good, and with digital technology, sharing is easy. (I
 mean non-commercial redistribution of exact copies.) So sharing ought
 to be legal, and preventing sharing is no excuse to make e-books into
 handcuffs for readers. If e-books mean that readers' freedom must
 either increase or decrease, we must demand the increase.</p>
 
 <div class="announcement comment" role="complementary">
 <hr class="no-display" />
 <p>Also consider reading <a href="/philosophy/ebooks.html">
 E-Books: Freedom Or Copyright</a>.</p>
 <hr class="no-display" />
 </div>
 
 <div class="infobox extra" role="complementary">
 <hr />
 <p>This essay was originally published by <cite>The Guardian</cite>, on 17 April 2012,
 as &ldquo;<a
 href="https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2012/apr/17/sharing-ebooks-richard-stallman">Technology
 Should Help Us Share, Not Constrain Us</a>,&rdquo; with some surprise editing.  This
 version incorporates parts of that editing while restoring parts of the original
 text.</p>
 </div>
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 <p>Copyright &copy; 2012, 2021, 2022 Richard Stallman</p>
 
 <p>This page is licensed under a <a rel="license"
 href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/">Creative
 Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License</a>.</p>
 
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 <p class="unprintable">Updated:
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 $Date: 2022/01/01 17:25:38 $
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