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Late last week Tor UK posted an update on their efforts to go DRM-free.
It’s been just over one year since Tor-Forge Books announced plans to distribute their ebooks without DRM (and 9 months since the DRM was officially removed), and the move has seen a lot of support by both authors and readers.
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Simon & Schuster announced today that authors will soon have access to new reports on S&S anti-piracy efforts.
This publisher has been a customer of the Attributor anti-piracy service since 2011, so naturally they have been receiving detailed reports on exactly what Attributor has been doing to earn its keep.
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I’ve mentioned the Android reading app Moon+ Reader once or twice (it’s bundled into the hacked firmware for the Sony Reader T1 and T2). It’s a very popular app with excellent file management features, ebook formatting options, and support for downloading ebooks from website.
It’s one of the more popular reading apps available for Android, second only to Aldiko in terms of downloads – or at least it was before the app was removed from Google Play.
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iracy is as much of a problem in China as in the rest of the world, only with a twist.
Some litigants in China have decided (rather than pursue the actual pirates) to instead sue the easier target (who also coincidentally happens to have deep pockets). Today that is Apple. The Chinese state news agency Xinhua reported today:
The Beijing No. 2 Intermediate People’s Court ordered Apple to pay a total of 1.03 million yuan (165,908 U. S. dollars) to eight Chinese writers and two companies for violating their copyrights.
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Ask anyone in digital publishing and they’ll tell you that fighting piracy is a growth business.
Whether you’re conning the US government into illegally closing down legit blogs, finding new ways to attach DRM to a file, or looking for a way to punish customers, there’s always money to be made for one tech company or another.
That’s why I’m not surprised today to learn that Attributor, a widely known anti-piracy service, has been snapped up by Digimarc.
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I’ve long believed that the best way to fight piracy is to turn the pirate into a customer (or product, as the case may be) by offering them what they want. While I wouldn’t claim to be the first to say that (I picked it up from Techdirt), but there has been a marked lack of acceptance of the idea among the legacy media.
Until today. The new series of Doctor Who is debuting on Saturday and for the first time ever the Australian Broadcasting Company is going to make the new episodes available online (via their iview media app)- before they’re broadcast.
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Here’s a story I didn’t expect to have to write.
Lendink, on of the many sites set up to arrange for Nook and Kindle owners to lend ebooks to each other, got another DMCA notice yesterday. It’s the first such notice since the site restarted last week, and it’s a doozy.
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In case you thought that Tor’s enlightened stance on DRM might be a sign that the ice might be starting to melt around the Big Six publishers, think again. Today in Publishers Weekly, Cory Doctorow writes he has obtained a letter that the UK arm of Hachette sent to authors publishing with it asking that they demand Tor return DRM to their titles, and advising them it will be adding language to its standard boilerplate contract requiring that any titles Hachette UK licenses for its region must be locked down with DRM elsewhere in the world.
Doctorow is, of course, appalled at this, pointing out that DRM hasn’t stopped Hachette’s works from being available from peer-to-peer networks now, and all it does is hinder consumers’ legitimate uses of the e-books. However, The Bookseller is carrying statements Hachette UK execs have made in response, pointing out that the boilerplate language is as negotiable as any other part of the contract and that a lot of publishers include language insisting licensees use DRM in their contracts already.
Columnist David Pogue has just posted a brief but sure-to-be controversial entry to his New York Times blog. Wanting to give his son some good e-books to read at summer camp on his iPod Touch (you go, kid!), he recommended the late Robert Ludlum’s seminal spy novel The Bourne Identity. But when he went to buy it, it was nowhere to be found—it seems that the Ludlum estate and the publisher have not been able to agree on e-book royalty terms.
So, Pogue did what a good many frustrated e-book-desiring fans would do in a similar situation (and, indeed, what untold thousands of Harry Potter fans did do over the years pre-Pottermore)—he torrented it. But then he sent the publisher a check for $9.99. That makes everything kosher, right?
Earlier this week I posted about a security hole in the web browser on the Kindle Touch, one which would enable a hacker to create a malicious website which could damage your Kindle Touch. This could be a serious issue if someone made use of it, but like all gray clouds, there’s a silver lining.
This same security hole makes it easy to jailbreak the Kindle Touch.
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