These days, I try to stay away from products and services that lock me in. When I sign-up to use a new web application, I want to know that I can export my data so I can switch services later if I choose. This is especially important to me when I am purchasing digital media. When I buy a music album, I should be able to play that album on the device I choose. Unfortunately, many of the largest digital media distributors do not agree. They use Digital Rights Management software to lock consumers into using their platform.
Apple did this with songs from iTunes for many years until finally caving to pressure from consumer advocates who sued the company in 2005. Since 2009, Apple has been selling songs without DRM protection but videos are still afflicted with the restrictive software and users who purchased music before 2009 have to pay $0.30 per song to get clean copies of their music. The lawsuit is still pending (http://news.cnet.com/8301-13579_3-20055155-37.html).
I used to turn a blind eye to Apple's anti-consumer-rights behavior because I really dislike Windows, but over the years I grew more annoyed with the lack of choice that Apple affords its users and I decided to leave the Jobsian walled garden; I switched to Linux at the end of 2010. I still have about 300 songs that will only play in iTunes.
When I switched to using Linux (I'll probably blog about that later), I began to notice how prevalent vendor lock-in really is because a lot of the software needed to use DRM-protected media is not available for Linux. Of course, there are plenty of Linux programs that are great for video, audio, and ebooks, but media vendors do not want you to use these programs; they want you to use their software and buy their devices (iPods, Kindles, etc.). Fortunately, some clever and dedicated developers have come up with ways to run a lot of Windows software in Linux, so now I can actually run Kindle for PC and Adobe Digital Editions in Linux, but I don’t really want to; I like Calibre better and I see no good reason why I should not be allowed to read the ebooks that I paid for in whatever program I choose.
Media vendors will tell you that DRM protection is needed to protect the artists and enforce copyright laws. This is nonsense. DRM protection does not stop piracy; it just makes things less convenient for consumers. Author J.K. Rowling refused to publish ebook versions of the Harry Potter series for several years, but illegal ebooks were made from the paper versions and sold or given away online nonetheless. Also, getting around DRM protection is not that difficult; it’s just annoying.
I recently searched around for a way to circumvent Kindle’s DRM so I could read my ebooks in Calibre. I did this only after reading an article about an appeals court ruling that declared circumvention of DRM to be legal when its purpose falls under fair use. Now, I have tried to figure out how the ruling exactly applies to my situation but I cannot make sense of all the legal lingo. All I intend to do with my ebooks is read them, and I am pretty sure that is fair use since after all that is why the authors published them and made them available for me to purchase. I have no intention of selling or redistributing the ebooks I have unscrambled. I suppose my wife might read some of them someday, but last I checked that was okay to do with a paper book. Should she be required to buy her own copy?
I am not any sort of technical administrator or software engineer, but the process I have to go through to unlock my books is probably too much for the average computer user. It is really NOT hard but most people will be happy to just buy one ebook reader or another and go on believing they must purchase their ebooks from that same company. People who buy Nooks, Sony Readers, and almost anything but the Kindle have a lot of options because most of those e-readers use Adobe Digital Editions for DRM, but these folks will not be able to use ebooks from Amazon, who has the largest selection. These are the people affected by DRM protection, not would-be pirates. Amazon must understand this and they are probably working on ways to improve their DRM protection so horrible people like me cannot read the books that we PAY for on anything but Kindle software, and consumers will keep buying Kindles instead of e-readers made the competition.
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