deborah | Entries tagged with digital rights management

Clearing out old tabs, I find this great post by

free_govt_info, "New Best. Title. Ever" really exemplifies two points which are so strange about copy-blocked PDFs. This post showcases a government publication for which the PDF was released so that the text could not be copied out or the images extracted. First of all, this copy protection was completely legally unnecessary; the PDF was of a public domain government document, so it was crippled for no reason whatsoever. And more humorously, as you can see if you look at the various ETAs in the post, the electronic limitations of the PDF don't even work! It's very easy for anyone with technical know-how to break the protections on any PDF that's readable by the user, and without violating any provisions of the DMCA, either. As long as you can view it, you can copy and print it -- but you have to know how. So this government document, public domain and owned by the citizenry, was ineffectively and unnecessarily crippled. What's up with that?

Of course, this post is only made better by the fact that the government document in question, now available as an open PDF on the FGI post, is entitled "Hills Bros. Coffee Can Chronology: Field Guide. Awesome.

In honor of Defective by Design's Day against DRM, I'd like to take a moment to provide free advertising for EMusic. It's a subscription-based service with no commitment (and an available free trial). Depending on the subscription purchased songs cost anywhere from $.22 to $.25/song, and they are all DRM-free MP3s which the company trusts you to use legally. The songs are almost entirely independent label -- those songs which you really don't hear about because their labels can't afford to buy huge displays at the front of the record store. Because they are so inexpensive (and already paid for, given the subscription mechanism) I've purchased a lot of songs from tiny bands I never would have heard of otherwise, and have expanded my music choices a fair amount. And it's all DRM-free!

(See more DRM-free stores here.)

Remember, the giftgiving season is coming, and a lot of the latest gadgets this year contain digital rights management capabilities which severely limit your abilities to use the content you have legally purchased in ways which are completely legal under current United States law. If you buy a DRM-enabled song from iTunes, you are technologically prevented from using that track in all the ways which are legal for you to do so. Think about digital rights management when you are making holiday purchases, or when you are purchasing electronic book content for your library. Libraries are very concerned with making sure that the rights of license holders are protected, but the license holders are going out of their way to make it difficult for libraries to enable even legal uses.)

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Gnomic Utterances. These are traditional, and are set at the head of each section of the Guidebook. The reason for them is lost in the mists of History. They are culled by the Management from a mighty collection of wise sayings probably compiled by a SAGE—probably called Ka’a Orto’o—some centuries before the Tour begins. The Rule is that no Utterance has anything whatsoever to do with the section it precedes. Nor, of course, has it anything to do with Gnomes.

Ramblings on Librarianship, Technology, and Academia

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Entries tagged with digital rights management

coffee cans, government documents, and technology

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