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+1. E-books Must Increase Our Freedom, Not Decrease It {#e-books-must-increase-our-freedom-notdecrease-it .chapter}
+=====================================================
+
+I love The Jehovah Contract, and I’d like everyone else to love it too.
+I have lent it out at least six times over the years. Printed books let
+us do that.
+
+I couldn’t do that with most commercial e-books. It’s “not allowed.” And
+if I tried to disobey, the software in e-readers has malicious features
+called Digital Restrictions Management (DRM, for short) to restrict
+reading, so it simply won’t work. The e-books are encrypted so that only
+proprietary software with malicious functionality can display them.
+
+Many other habits that we readers are accustomed to are “not allowed”
+for e-books. With the Amazon “Kindle” (for which “Swindle”[(1)](#FOOT1)
+is a more fitting name), to take one example, users can’t buy a book
+anonymously with cash. “Kindle” books are typically available from
+Amazon only, and Amazon makes users identify themselves. Thus, Amazon
+knows exactly which books each user has read. In a country such as the
+UK, where you can be prosecuted for possessing a forbidden
+book,[(2)](#FOOT2) this is more than hypothetically Orwellian.
+
+@firstcopyingnotice{{@footnoterule See also “The Danger of E-Books”
+(@pageref{E-Books Danger}), and please consider joining our mailing
+about the dangers of e-books, at
+<http://defectivebydesign.org/ebooks.html>. @medskip
+@footnoterule@smallskip Copyright © 2012 Richard Stallman\
+ {This essay was originally published on <http://guardian.co.uk>, on
+17 April 2012, as “Technology Should Help Us Share, Not Constrain Us,”
+with some surprise editing. This version incorporates parts of that
+editing while restoring parts of the original text and is part of
+@fsfsthreecite}
+
+Furthermore, you can’t sell the e-book after you read it (if Amazon has
+its way, the used book stores where I have passed many an afternoon will
+be history). You can’t give it to a friend either, because according to
+Amazon you never really owned it. Amazon requires users to sign an
+end-user license agreement (EULA) which says so.
+
+You can’t even be sure it will still be in your machine tomorrow. People
+reading 1984 in the “Kindle” had an Orwellian experience: their e-books
+vanished right before their eyes, as Amazon used a malicious software
+feature called a “back door” to remotely delete them (virtual
+book-burning; is that what “Kindle” means?). But don’t worry; Amazon
+promised never to do this again, except by order of the state.
+
+With software, either the users control the program (making such
+software Libre or Free[(3)](#FOOT3)) or the program controls its users
+(non-Libre). Amazon’s e-book policies imitate the distribution policies
+of non-Libre software, but that’s not the only relationship between the
+two. The malicious software features described above[(4)](#FOOT4) are
+imposed on users via software that’s not Libre. If a Libre program had
+malicious features like those, some users skilled at programming would
+remove them, then provide the corrected version to all the other users.
+Users can’t change non-Libre software, which makes it an ideal
+instrument for exercising power over the public.[(5)](#FOOT5)
+
+Any one of these encroachments on our freedom is reason aplenty to say
+no. If these policies were limited to Amazon, we’d bypass them, but the
+other e-book dealers’ policies are roughly similar.
+
+What worries me most is the prospect of losing the option of printed
+books. The Guardian has announced “digital-only reads”: in other words,
+books available only at the price of freedom. I will not read any book
+at that price. Five years from now, will unauthorized copies be the only
+ethically acceptable copies for most books?
+
+It doesn’t have to be that way. With anonymous payment on the internet,
+paying for downloads of non-DRM non-EULA e-books would respect our
+freedom. Physical stores could sell such e-books for cash, like digital
+music on CDs—still available even though the music industry is
+aggressively pushing DRM-restrictive services such as Spotify. Physical
+CD stores face the burden of an expensive inventory, but physical e-book
+stores could write copies onto your USB memory stick, the only inventory
+being memory sticks to sell if you need.
+
+The reason publishers give for their restrictive e-books practices is to
+stop people from sharing copies. They say this is for the sake of the
+authors; but even if it did serve the authors’ interests (which for
+quite famous authors it may), it could not justify DRM, EULAs or the
+Digital Economy Act which persecutes readers for sharing. In practice,
+the copyright system does a bad job of supporting authors aside from the
+most popular ones. Other authors’ principal interest is to be better
+known, so sharing their work benefits them as well as readers. Why not
+switch to a system that does the job better and is compatible with
+sharing?
+
+A tax on memories and internet connectivity, along the general lines of
+what most EU countries do, could do the job well if three points are got
+right. The money should be collected by the state and distributed
+according to law, not given to a private collecting society; it should
+be divided among all authors, and we mustn’t let companies take any of
+it from them; and the distribution of money should be based on a sliding
+scale, not in linear proportion to popularity. I suggest using the cube
+root of each author’s popularity: if A is eight times as popular as B, A
+gets twice B’s amount (not eight times B’s amount). This would support
+many fairly popular writers adequately instead of making a few stars
+richer.
+
+Another system is to give each e-reader a button to send some small sum
+(perhaps 25 pence in the UK) to the author.
+
+Sharing is good, and with digital technology, sharing is easy. (I mean
+non-commercial redistribution of exact copies.) So sharing ought to be
+legal, and preventing sharing is no excuse to make e-books into
+handcuffs for readers. If e-books mean that readers’ freedom must either
+increase or decrease, we must demand the increase.
+
+<div class="footnote">
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+### Footnotes
+
+### [(1)](#DOCF1)
+
+@raggedright See “Why Call It the Swindle?” (@pageref{Swindle}) for more
+on this. @end raggedright
+
+### [(2)](#DOCF2)
+
+@raggedright Ben Quinn, “Man in London Charged with Terrorism Offences
+over Al-Qaida Document,” 4 April 2012,
+<http://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/apr/04/al-qaida-terrorism>. @end
+raggedright
+
+### [(3)](#DOCF3)
+
+@raggedright See “What Is Free Software?” (@pageref{Definition}) for the
+full definition of free software. @end raggedright
+
+### [(4)](#DOCF4)
+
+@raggedright See <http://gnu.org/proprietary/proprietary.html> for an
+evolving list of these threats. @end raggedright
+
+### [(5)](#DOCF5)
+
+@raggedright See my articles “Free Software Is Even More Important Now”
+(@pageref{More Important Now}) and “The Problem Is Software Controlled
+by Its Developer,” at [http://gnu.org/\
+philosophy/the-root-of-this-problem.html](http://gnu.org/%3Cbr%3Ephilosophy/the-root-of-this-problem.html),
+for more on this issue. @end raggedright
+
+</div>
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+This document was generated by *tonghuix* on *March 25, 2016* using
+[*texi2html 1.82*](http://www.nongnu.org/texi2html/).\