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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>
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