| I find it quite disheartening that nobody (or at least very few people in this thread) have looked who the complainant(s) actually are, i.e. the European Digital Reading Lab (EDRL) and (indirectly) the Readium foundation, both of which are community–driven non-profit organisation, operating on very modest budgets. The Readium LCP software system (as distinct from the Readium the reading applications) was created a community effort to offer readers a user-friendly alternative to proprietary DRM systems. IT plays a particularly strong role in libraries ebook lending where it’s rule it is to ensure that a loan is just that a loan. I understand the misgivings some have about the DMCA, copyright law and associated copyright protections, and the capitalist system in general. However, please set these aside for a moment and look at the situation from the perspective of readers, authors and others. Readium LCP is fundamentally a trust system. It relies on copyright holders and that is not just large media companies, but small independent publishers, authors, agents and similar. The largest consumer publisher (Penguin Random House) is but less than 1/100th the size of Apple or Amazon. Also the earning of an average author in the UK is in the neighborhood of a mere £7,00 per year. If beg everyone to consider what the practical ramifications would be of destroying trust in a community-driven platform hat spent years to generate.
It means library lending of ebooks would cease entirely or revert to the old system such as Adobe’s RMSDK (reader mobile software development kit) with all the usability issues so familiar to anyone who does software development in the publishing ecosystem. Aside: the acronym LCP originally stood for “lightweight content protection system” it is “lightweight” by design. For “marketing" reasons (or what I call “trust building”) it was later changed to stand for “licensed content protection”. Also note that this is a discussion about consumer publishing “trade publishing in the vernacular of the industry) which is distinct from academic publishing (scientific journals, textbooks, etc.) a market dominated by Elsevier, Springer Nature and similar where Readium LCP is hardly used. Disclaimer: Yes, I personally engage in weekly Readium engineering calls, but neither me not my organisation use or contribute to Readium LCP. WE use and contribute to the general Readium ebook reading software. I can attest that Readium comes with all the issues and problems of a community-driven open software system, but please recognise it for what it is, a community-driven , not-for profit effort. |
That’s a non-sequitur. RMS would have something pithy to say about pretty handcuffs or such, but all I have to offer is: the user friendly alternative to DRM is having no DRM.
> The largest consumer publisher (Penguin Random House) is but less than 1/100th the size of Apple or Amazon.
Won’t someone think of the billionaires?