Permanent URL: https://cyber.law.harvard.edu/lists/arc/dpla-discussion/2012-01/msg00013.htm... juan carlos -------- Original Message -------- Subject: [dpla-discussion] Ebooks: opportunity and threat Date: Tue, 10 Jan 2012 13:08:27 -0500 From: Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org> Reply-To: rms@gnu.org To: dpla-discussion@eon.law.harvard.edu Ebooks must be convenient, I suppose. They are also a threat: to libraries and to readers of books. The threat to libraries is that ebooks eliminate their traditional function. Maybe libraries can find new functions or maybe not. However, all that assumes that ebooks as we see them today will and should be accepted by society. If they are instead an unethical attack on our freedom, that changes everything. And that's what they are. See http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html for a 1997 picture of the ugly future we are headed towards. What ebooks do to their readers directly is much worse than what they might do indirectly via their effects on libraries. Most commercially published ebooks are simply not available under acceptable decent conditions. Commercial ebooks deny readers' traditional freedoms, through DRM and through mandatory contracts. You're not allowed to give them or lend them. You're alwasy surveilled. You need proprietary technology to read them at all. See http://stallman.org/articles/ebooks.pdf. Under these conditions, the only ethical copy is an illegal copy, and any legal copy requires DRM decontamination (which is itself illegal). Libraries can't distribute the illegal ethical copies, and they must not distribute the legal unethical copies. Under these conditions, libraries must declare ebooks anathema. The only path to an ethical future for books and reading starts with society's rejection of user-restricting ebooks. Libraries and librarians are in the best position to mount this campaign. The first step is simple: reject the premise that business should dictate the terms on which we read books. Don't seek to adapt to ebooks as they are today -- denounce them and oppose them. Then librarians can say: We must have a library that lends printed books, books that don't restrict and attack their readers. Libraries will not be obsolete or anything like it. Libraries could hook up with print-on-demand systems so that they can have enormous catalogues but only print the books people ask for. If necessary, invite the first requester to pay for the printing of the copy. This compromise is preferable to partial acceptance of commercial ebooks, because it surrenders something secondary and preserves what is primary. Suppose we overcome the publishers and convert ebooks into something ethical? At that point, libraries may find a role in the digital publication of ebooks, in making them available to the public. Today's commercial ebooks leave no room for such a role, but ethical ones might. -- Dr Richard Stallman President, Free Software Foundation 51 Franklin St Boston MA 02110 USA www.fsf.org www.gnu.org Skype: No way! That's nonfree (freedom-denying) software. Use free telephony http://directory.fsf.org/category/tel/