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Related tags on billso.com

• copyright
• fair-use
• piracy

Related pages on billso.com

• Copyright and fair use
• Digital music

Related articles on billso.com

• 3 June 2008: 100 years of first sale
• 14 March 2008: Social media in action
• 21 February 2008: Copyright and fair use
• 4 February 2008: Better than free
• 15 October 2007: What’s wrong with copyright?
• 19 July 2007: A quick explanation of copyright law
• 26 May 2007: Cory Doctorow’s PWNED class finishes the term

I’ve written several articles about copyright and fair use.

Related tags on billso.com

• copyright
• Creative Commons
• fair-use
• piracy

Related pages on billso.com

• Creative Commons
• Digital music

Related articles on billso.com

• 16 July 2008: Apple can stop the Open Computer
• 8 July 2008: Scrabble vs Scrabulous
• 15 June 2006: The Associated Press and fair use on the Web
• 3 June 2008: 100 years of first sale
• 15 May 2008: Download that movie, lose your home
• 15 April 2008: Can Apple stop the Open Computer?
• 10 April 2008: Media giants want to end US fair use doctrine
• 24 March 2008: The used electronic textbook
• 14 March 2008: Social media in action
• 21 February 2008: Copyright and fair use
• 4 February 2008: Better than free
• 15 October 2007: What’s wrong with copyright?
• 19 July 2007: A quick explanation of copyright law
• 24 January 2007: More thoughts on cheating, copyright and paraphrasing
• 23 January 2007: Cheating is copyright infringement?
• 29 September 2006: US copyright law - in verse
• 15 August 2004: American Library Association promotes fair use
• 9 June 2004: Carmine Infantino wants his Flash back
• 28 June 2003: Harry Potter and the copyright wars
• 27 June 2003: Sue your best customers

From Gizmodo via BoingBoing comes a discussion of electronic book ownership. Electronic books or e-books are digital versions of a book. Users read the e-book on a computer, PDA, or a special e-book reader.

Amazon has its Kindle e-book reader, but I’m not willing to pay US$400 for it. I read enough books every year that Amazon could just give me the reader, and let me buy the e-books. The same goes for Sony’s reader, but at least the Kindle can download books and content through Sprint’s mobile phone network. Sony’s reader has to be loaded from a computer.

Both the Gizmodo and BoingBoing posts are based upon an article in the Columbia Science and Technology Law Review entitled The (Potential) Legal Validity of E-book Reader Restrictions, and written by Rajiv Batra, John Padro, Seung-Ju Paik and Sarah Calvert. The article wasn’t available on the Review’s web site, so I’m relying on portions that were posted to the Gizmodo post.

The used paper book

In the United States, paper books may be resold according the first sale doctrine. This rule helps support the used textbook market, by allowing book purchasers to transfer their ownership of a book to another party without violating the copyright holders’ rights. A key point of this rule is that no copies can be made of the book. The book’s owner cannot run down to the copy shop, make a backup or archival copy of the book, and then resell or return the original copy.

As I pointed out on 4 February 2008 in my discussion of this Kevin Kelly post, electronic media are a copy of an original source file. The Internet is a massive digital copy machine, after all. Web users are looking at copies of files their web browser has retrieved from other servers. Batra and his three co-authors address the implications of e-books upon the first sale doctrine. Could a used e-book market exist? Probably not, because e-book purchases don’t have their own physical copy of the book. They might have a license to use an electronic copy of the book.

As the four law students point out, it is up to the courts to determine if purchasing an e-book license is comparable to purchasing a paper book. The authors then discuss the restrictive DRM that Sony and Amazon have added to their electronic book hardware.

Selecting a textbook

It’s enough to give me a wee headache, especially as I evaluate new textbooks for my courses. Instructors use textbooks so students have a ready resource and reference in the course. Textbooks are expensive and heavy, especially in graduate courses. E-books are a nice option, but electronic gadgets are heavy and expensive, too. Many users have problems reading an e-book, and sometimes its difficult or impossible to make notes in an e-book. Paper books don’t need electricity, either.

I really like paper books, but I fear that their days are numbered. Textbook publishers are more sensitive to student complaints about textbook costs these days. The textbook industry has seen what’s happened to the music publishers. It’s not hard to find scanned electronic copies of popular textbooks on file-sharing services. When a significant number of university students stop buying textbooks, we may enter a runaway change scenario. Some academic authors already self-publish their textbooks, so they can offer paper and digital copies at a low price and keep more of the revenue. At some point, the major textbook publishers have to decide what business they are in: the paper book publishing business, or the content distribution business.

Textbooks unbound

I have spoken with two publishers who offer shrink-wrapped versions of their textbooks. These are unbound versions of textbooks. The pages are three-hole punched, so students can slip the book into a binder, or carry the chapters they need for a specific day. This business model sounds more reasonable than an e-book.

There’s a catch, of course. A shrink-wrapped book cannot be returned or sold back to a university bookstore in many cases. So a shrink-wrapped paper copy of a book is, in some ways, as restrictive as an e-book. Of course, students can sell or pass along their used binder books to other students. Unless a student examines that binder closely, they are trusting that the binder includes every page of the book. It’s much easier to pull pages from a binder than from a traditional bound book. That’s one reason that bookbinding helps maintain the value of a paper book.

It’s possible to copy a bound book, of course, but it’s a much faster process if the binding is removed. The scanned or copied pages look more consistent, too. The book’s resale value is destroyed when the binding is removed, but the electronic copies of that paper book can be redistributed.

The unbound paper textbook is a sign that textbook publishers are dealing with runaway change that may outpace their companies abilities to adapt and survive. I haven’t mentioned other tactics the textbook publishing industry uses to lock-in customers and enhance value, including custom publishing, digital and web-based content.

Related posts and pages on billso.com

• Copyright and fair use
• Creative Commons
• 3 June 2008: 100 years of first sale
• 24 March 2008: The used electronic textbook
• 4 February 2008: Better than free
• 5 October 2007: What’s wrong with copyright?
• 17 July 2007: A quick explanation of copyright law

In this post on his blog, Kevin Kelly discusses how the Internet is a massive copying machine. This is a major reason that digital rights management (DRM) does not protect business models very well.

The music and movie industries have focused on protecting content and managing copying, instead of building and offering value that is difficult or hard to copy. U2’s manager recently attacked ISPs, search engines and other companies for aiding and abetting music and video file sharing on the Internet. (CBC).

Kelly, on the other hand, proposes a network economy where sharing and abundance are key success factors that every content publisher must satisfy. He also identifies 8 key success factors that spur customers to buy instead of copy.

It’s difficult to copy reputation and trust, but it’s rather easy to offer or measure these attributes. Just look at eBay.

Reputation and trust are relevant in education. Jason Schultz published links to several YouTube videos of students demonstrating how to cheat in school. BoingBoing’s Cory Doctorow discussed his own experiences with cheating when he linked to Schultz’s post.

Schools offer interpretation, which is another form of value that is difficult to copy. Grading, evaluation, advising are good examples of content that is very difficult to copy. These also have elements of personalization, which help increase their value.

Patronage is another factor. Some users want to pay for content, even if it can be downloaded free of charge.  Physical forms that cannot be downloaded through the Internet can also make content more valuable – cover art and booklets are examples in the music industry.

Convenience is also an important value generator. Immediate access to content may be more important to some users than eventually finding free access through peer-to-peer networks or file sharing. Metadata, XML and web services are some of the tools that small and independent publishers use to sell their content.

Blogs are also part of the value system that is created as multiple value chains link together from end to end. BoingBoing is a good example – that blog has several editors who promote their solo media projects through the web site. I discovered Kelly’s article on a BoingBoing post, as a matter of fact.

We mentioned Netflix during our IS 7010-T class discussion last Thursday. According to USA Today, Netflix has changed some of the restrictions on its broadband movie rental service yesterday, in anticipation of Apple’s entry into the same market.

Netflix will allow most of its customers to view TV shows and movies from its 6000-title library without the old cap of 17 hours usage per month. I would assume that most Netflix customers were under these limits in the first place.

Apple will roll out a 1000-title online library next month, and renters will have 24 hours to watch their video before it expires in a puff of DRM.

Netflix uses an on-demand model that lets viewers watch the title at their own pace.

While Netflix charges a stable monthly fee, Apple will charge a fee for each title viewed. The Netflixpricing model seems much more flexible to me.

Apple’s service will use QuickTime and iTunes, so it supports MacOS, Windows and AppleTV boxen.

The Netflix service requires Windows Media Player 11 and a Windows OS – it’s possible to run this software suite on an Intel-based Mac with some help from Boot Camp, or perhaps an emulator solution like Parallels Desktop.

Keep in mind that online movie distribution requires a great deal of bandwidth. Pricing is one way to manage viewer demand, of course.