librarian.net

Big big news. The American Library Association, Electronic Frontier Foundation and friends just won their joint challenge to the FCCs weird Broadcast Flag regulations, decision can be read here. Not only does this mean that the FCC has to back off from trying to require all digital video receivers to have special Digital Rights Management embedded [that’s Congress’s job, the courts say, if they choose to do it] but the courts also agreed that the ALA, and by extention librarians and educators, had standing to file this case in the first place. Here’s an example from one of the librarian’s affadavits cited in the decision.

There is clearly a substantial probability that, if enforced, the Flag Order will immediately harm the concrete and particularized interests of the NCSU Libraries. Absent the Flag Order, the Libraries will continue to assist NCSU faculty members make broadcast clips available to students in distanceeducation courses via the Internet, but there is a substantial probability that the Libraries will be unable to do this if the Flag Order takes effect. It is also beyond dispute that, if this court vacates the Flag Order, the Libraries will be able to continue to assist faculty members lawfully redistribute broadcast clips to their students.

Get more links and some discussion here, plus the great quote from the decision “Congress does not…hide elephants in mouseholes.”

Proprietary formats — whether it’s Windows or Mac — are one of the big issues with ebooks and, therefore, ebooks in libraries. Here is one patron’s response to their library system going with Windows Media format ebooks that won’t play on Macs or Linux machines. He worked out a song with a friend: Your Audio Book Sounds Silent to Me [listen to it, it’s short and fun]. Phil works on digital divide and digital minorities generally. I happen to have read his notes about the song the day he also posted Trying to Update this Site from a Computer at a Public Library. Fascinating.

Do you know who is getting the shortest end of this stick? The tenants in affordable housing units in Northern Virginia where GNU/Linux computer labs have been set up for them to use. Many of these tenants are hardworking immigrant families. Could the adults and children in these families benefit from greater access to audio books? You tell me. “Sorry, buster, you’re a digital minority. No audio books for you. Here, let me relieve you of your taxpayer dollars all the same.” How about this for irony — one of the books currently inaccessible? Martin Luther King, Jr., On Leadership: Inspiration & Wisdom for Challenging Times, by Donald T. Phillips. I hear it’s a good book.

[tametheweb]

I’ve been unplugged for a good deal of the past week and I can’t say I’ve minded too much. You can see some pictures here if you like visuals, they have almost no library content, maybe a little museum content. I’m easing back in to plugged-in-edness by reading the latest Cites & Insights and I’m really enjoying the section called ©3: Balancing Rights about the many complicated issues involved with DRM and rights in the digital media world generally. I’ve been scratching the surface of DRM issues in some of my talks, but Walt really picks apart many of the tricky issues involved in his direct and non-axe-grinding way. DRM curious? Go read it.

From the DRM Blog: Rent, Lease, or Buy - Which Model Is Right For You? No one is saying there’s something wrong with any case, but you don’t want to think your library is buying something when you’re really just renting the right to use it.

I have half a dozen songs from one service and three songs from another service and about 100 songs from a subscription service. I try the services because I cannot give my readers good advice if I do not try the various schemes for selling/renting digital content. But, because I am no longer paying the monthly subscription, I do not have access to those 100 songs I downloaded. The other songs have to be played through “authorized” players and so again I feel constrained. I have some open source software that I like for playing music but cannot use it with any of the content I downloaded.

Teleread makes the assertion that it’s not writers [or some writers] who are pushing DRM for e-books, it’s publishers. No surprise there. If you want, contrast these three “What is DRM?” pages: wikipedia, Microsoft, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation to get a very odd amalgam of ideas of what people think it is.

…my own thinking is that without DRM the e-book business would be at least ten times its present size, now a miserable $50 million or less in annual global sales. But forget about that. Let’s just carry the clueless authors’ paranoia to its logical conclusion. Maybe books should appear only on stone tablets. To guard against piracy, Famous Writers can specify that their precious masterpieces be chiseled only on tablets above a certain weight.

Jason has a good example of how DRM can affect libraries. Can you count the different ways this ebook is not like a real book?

Speaking of DRM, let’s look at what ten years of it have done so far. I’ve been reading the Intellectual Property & Social Justice blog this morning and they have a summary of an EFF white paper on the subject. The IP-SJ blurb does a great job of giving some “in a nutshell” descriptions both of what DRM is, as well as what is wrong with it, especially for libraries and educators and anyone who has an obligation to provide content to all the public. I’ve excerpted the list of negative effects DRM has had for libraries, in the developed world where the EFF states “it has been in wide deployment for a decade with no benefit to artists and with substantial cost to the public and to due process, free speech and other civil society fundamentals.”

• The success of the information society depends on digital content being accessible. Digital content must not locked up behind technical barriers.
• Libraries must not be prevented by DRM from availing themselves of their lawful rights under national copyright law and must be able to extend their services to the digital environment.
• Long term preservation and archiving, essential to preserving cultural identities, maintaining diversity of peoples, languages and cultures and in shaping the future, must not be jeopardized by DRM.

About half the people at my second talk and very few at my first talk knew what Digital Rights Management (DRM) was. Since librarians will be dealing with more products with increasing amounts of DRM, it’s a good term to get cozy with, carry a few examples in your toolkit, etc. The DRM blog is a good place to start learning as is EFF’s DRM section. My favorite examples, phrased in the form of patron questions:
“This DVD won’t play on my computer without me having an Internet connection and installing special software. Why?”
“I paid for a song using the iTunes store but now I can’t move that song to a different computer. Why?”
“I can’t play music I’ve legally downloaded from the Internet in open source format on my iPod. Why?” [note: not strictly a DRM issue]
“Is it really illegal for me to use my screenreader software to listen to the ebook I’ve cheked out? Why? “