Free Culture by Larry Lessig

As a brief preface: I hate to say it, but sometimes I feel like this comic. I keep up to date on the issue, following the latest news at sites like slashdot, but I don't feel as strongly as them even though I still feel stronger than the average American.

Lessig discusses the protection of content vs. protection of form of content. This issue, I believe, is one of the most interesting. We discussed in my other class as well this situation with the adobe e-books, with all the restrictions. At one point, they even restricted copies to a single computer - if you buy it at home, but want to read it at work, you have to pay again. This is for works in the public domain - works that are supposed to be free. They also get into their restrictions of what you can copy and how much you can copy, all due to the "form" - their ebook, rather than the content - a work which is in the public domain and can be used in any way anybody wants. It is also of sketchy morality to sell something which should be - and sometimes is - available freely on the net.

Part of the problem, as we have discussed in my other class, is that companies are desperately trying to cling to their old models of the world - ones which do not involve the world wide web. It is understandable - the internet as we know it is an invention of the last decade, whereas book publishers and music companies have had their systems at work for far longer than that. Instead of moving with the times and trying to take advantage of the new market, even if it means losing some control over their products, these industries are sticking with the inertia of their state and trying to force the new technologies to behave like old ones. Some textbook companies will sell textbooks online - with passwords, that expire after a term. It is true that this will keep people from just passing on the file to a friend who takes the class the next or same semester, and will kill the second hand textbook market, but it is a ridiculous and exploitive idea. Demanding that people pay for a book, even if it is not as high a price as the print textbook, for something that you will not be able to use as a resource later, will not be able to resell - which the law allows, and is a good way of recouping some of the money expended each semester - is unreasonable.

Other companies, like overdrive.com, offer ebooks to libraries, which is a great idea, but again they try to shoehorn it into a product that it isn't. They not only restrict how long you are allowed to open the ebook - a perfectly understandable restriction, as you can't keep library books forever either - but they restrict the number of copies that can be taken out at a time. This is a completely arbitrary restriction - there is no reason every person who logs on couldn't be able to take out the same book - but is put together in a very stupid way (IMO) - books are not "returnable," they just expire, so there is no way to free up a book you finished for others to get sooner, like you might return the library book to the shelf. As a result, almost all books are already "taken out" and once a copy is out, there is a mandatory three week wait until it is available to another user.