I’ve never been a fan of Digital Rights Management. In general, the anti-piracy measure frustrates legitimate consumers (such as finding out music you PAID to download won’t play on the MP3 player of your choice) while pirates always find a way around it.
Today, all this took a deliciously ironic twist over Amazon’s Kindle E-book reader.
Many customers woke up this morning to find that Amazon had remotely deleted two books from their collection.
If this sounds Orwellian, well, wait for it. According to David Pogue’s blog at the New York Times, George Orwell’s 1984 and Animal Farm were the two books that had been deleted at the request of the rights holder.
Now, getting past the irony (delicious as it may be) this SNAFU really underscores the issue of being expected to pay for digital content.
A frequent argument used against pirating music off the Internet is “You wouldn’t walk into a music store and stuff a bunch of CDs in your pocket.”
Well, it goes both ways. If Chapters employees broke into my apartment and swiped a few books I paid for, we’d have a pretty big problem (and some injured Chapters employees.)
Worse is that I’m fairly sure if one were to find a place to download said books illegally, they wouldn’t be getting deleted.
That said, the idea of an e-book reader has intrigued me for a while though I don’t have one since the price is still pretty high for this poor freelance writer. However, were I able to afford one, it definitely wouldn’t be the Kindle and just because it isn’t even available in Canada. I mean, not to put the tinfoil hat on, but I really don’t want to carry something around that the manufacturer can access remotely any time.
The economy is quickly moving to selling ones and zeroes rather than physical products and in many ways, that’s for the better. But really, this whole issue of ownership needs to be figured out before it takes off any further.
