Cory Doctorow

In my last column I wrote about Tesco's graceful exit from the ebook business, offloading its customers - and their precious libraries - to Kobo. While applauding the commitment to preserving customers' purchases, it remains a shame that this sort of transfer is even necessary. Storing books - or anything else - in "the cloud" always comes with a trade-off: everything you put there is backed up and presumably safe for a while, but it's also still controlled by the retailer- - not by the customer who legally purchased it.

This is Copyright Week, in which various people supporting more reasonable copyright laws highlight some of the problems with existing laws and important concepts that should be in copyright reform efforts. Today's topic is "you bought it, you own it," -- a concept that is often held back due to bad copyright laws. A few months ago, a bill was introduced in Congress called YODA -- the You Own Devices Act -- which would allow the owner of computer hardware to sell the devices with the software on it

In the course of my recent extended interview with Cory Doctorow in Budapest, I asked him whether he saw parallels between post-Charlie Hebdo government attitudes towards cybersecurity and Big Publishing/Big Media attitudes towards DRM. This was his response. The way to understand how big publishers think about DRM is not that they think it really prevents […]

The post Cory Doctorow on the parallels between DRM and cybersecurity policy appeared first on TeleRead: News and views on e-books, libraries, publishing and related topics.

Cory Doctorow came over to Budapest at the invitation of the Center for Media, Data and Society of Central European University to speak on policing computers and other issues. In the course of a fascinating interview with me, he shared a slew of observations on a great many issues, many of which I’ll be presenting in […]

The post Cory Doctorow speaks on self-publishing, Amazon, DRM, Hachette, and a whole lot else besides appeared first on TeleRead: News and views on e-books, libraries, publishing and related topics.

The technical implausibility and unintended consequences of digital locks are big problems for digital-lock makers. But we're more interested in what digital locks do to creators and their investors, and there's one important harm we need to discuss before we move on. Digital locks turn paying customers into pirates.

One thing we know about audiences is that they aren't very interested in hearing excuses about why they can't buy the media they want, when they want it, in the format they want to buy it in. Study after study shows that overseas downloading of U.S.

If you could use a good chuckle, webcomic “Help Desk” has just started a storyline focusing on e-book DRM. It seems to have been inspired by the letter that Cory Doctorow received from Hachette about DRM. Since some authors publish with Tor in the USA but Hachette in the UK, and Tor went DRM-free two […]

The post Webcomic ‘Help Desk’ takes on e-book DRM appeared first on TeleRead: News and views on e-books, libraries, publishing and related topics.

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