Doctorow drm microsoft

People sign up for streaming services for convenience and recommendations and search, all possible with or without DRM. DRM never delivered a world of flexible consumer choice, but it was never supposed to. All opinions expressed by commentators are solely their own and do not reflect the opinions of Locus. This article and more like it in the September issue of Locus. While you are here, please take a moment to support Locus with a one-time or recurring donation. This is why I believe that cracking DRM is morally justified.

If I paid good money for a book, I expect it to be mine forever and usable on whatever platform I want to read it on , not for as long as the company that thinks they rented it to me want me to have it.

This is why I always wanted to get my movies and whatnot in hardcopy. Books are at least independent of that. And Blu-ray players are still being made. You are concentrating largely on entertainment and textbooks. But DRM has a chilling effect on the independent researcher or scientist. I am in that demographic. Forty years ago, if I wanted to read an article in a refereed professional journal, I would go to the public library, or more likely to one of the many university research libraries in the city, and sit there for hours reading, and ultimately making photocopies of the relevant articles for my research notebook.

But 15 years ago, the relevant journals were electronic, and the universities limited access to students and faculty. For one research project, I had to drive five hours to a research library that did not have such limitations. Not only did this require the cost of several hundred miles travel, but required three overnights in a nearby hotel.

I spent ten hours reading and making notes, but I could not get hardcopy that was forbidden by their contract with the publisher so I did a lot of transcriptions. And not one of the citations I wanted to follow up on was hyperlinked, even to previous issues in the same journal. I have done research in many areas, for nonfiction book research, for the SF stories I am writing and may even be published someday, although I am still in rejection-letter mode , and as part of the research for professional development and various consulting gigs.

Now, I am retired, managing three research projects, and the usual degradation of the body from being 72 means that a five-hour drive and four days of tediously transcribing data are events that will probably never happen again.

I am doing bioengineering research for one project, developing a device that will reduce infant mortality rates in developing countries. I live in a city with an overabundance of medical research and teaching hospitals, and I cannot access the medical research libraries; even the one I used 15 years ago no longer permits outsiders to even enter, and the reference librarians are mandated to refuse service to outsiders. Information does not want to be free.

But people want information to BE free, or at least affordable, and that is not happening. The license CC BY-SA-NC that you plan to use has a serious flaw: as more and more people make modifications, they will produce versions for which it is not feasible even to ask for permission for commercial use. We want to hear from you! We're preparing a petition to a government agency on fair labelling practices for DRM-restricted devices, products and services Telling users how to strip the DRM from their legally purchased ebooks is not contributory copyright infringement, according to a ruling last month by a federal judge in New York.

Judge Denise Cote dismissed two publishers' claims of contributory infringement and inducement in Abbey House Media v. There were also independent reports that the program was sending back The program is still very problematic, however, as students who choose it In the week leading up the two-year anniversary of the SOPA blackout protests, EFF and others are talking about key principles that should guide copyright policy.

See the chart here. The holiday shopping season is upon us, and once again e-book readers promise to be a very popular gift. Last year's holiday season saw ownership of a dedicated e-reader device spike to nearly 1 in 5 Americans , and that number is poised to Simply put, it appears EFF and the California affiliates of the American Civil Liberties Union sponsored the bill, as it brings a much-needed digital rights upgrade to state law. Feedback will be sent to Microsoft: By pressing the submit button, your feedback will be used to improve Microsoft products and services.

Privacy policy. Use Microsoft PlayReady instead. Digital rights management DRM is a technology that content owners can use to protect digital media files by encrypting them with a key a piece of data that locks and unlocks the content. To play a protected ASF file, a consumer must obtain a separate license containing the key. There is an irony in this document being made available in a proprietary format: PDF.

Thanks for pointing this out. This document is a cogent explanation of how the music industry has always tried to put fences around music, and how it has always failed.