Online retailer Amazon.com made waves today by “recalling” two electronic books for their electronic book reader, the Kindle. The two books recalled were both written by George Orwell: Animal Farm, and 1984.
People who bought those books for their Kindle found the two of them missing from their devices this morning. They did receive refunds, but that’s not really the point.
One of the biggest problems with DRM (Digital Rights Management — essentially “copy-protected media”) is that for it to work, customers have to implicitly trust “the controllers of the DRM”, a relationship that starts off on the wrong foot since the whole reason we have DRM is because retailers don’t trust us. Some consumers are able to overlook that fact, and buy into DRM-controlled media regardless … like the tens of thousands of people who owned DIVX Movie Discs, DVD-like discs that all stopped working when “the controllers of the DRM” decided to turn off their servers. Every time these corporations do something boneheaded like that — or, say, deleting things off of people’s Kindles that they already bought — it breaks that trust just a little bit more. Good going, Amazon!
The irony of the fact that one of the titles was 1984 has escaped no one. Wikipedia states that in the book, “Smith grows disillusioned with his meager existence and so begins a rebellion against the system”.
Gee, wouldn’t it be immature for someone to rebel by posting links to both books in multiple, DRM-free formats?? Yeah, I thought so too.
(Wait, doesn’t Smith get arrested and tortured in the book?)
Yeah, but in the end he loves Big Brother.
So long as I don’t have to love American Idol and Are You Smarter Than A Fifth Grader? too, I’ll take my chances in bucking the system. I flatly refuse to have anything to do with DRM-controlled media, and this is a good example of why. This kind of goes into my rant about cloud computing a day or two ago: if I paid money for something, even if it’s just a digital file, I want it resident on my machine. Not a big fan of paying for the privelege of looking at something that lives on someone else’s server.
Animal Farm, too, huh? I can hear Napoleon now, “DRM good, unlicensed ownership baaaad!”