Microsoft Store's eBooks Will Soon 'Stop Working' When It Closes Their DRM Server (boingboing.net) 161
Cory Doctorow writes at BoingBoing:
"The books will stop working": That's the substance of the reminder that Microsoft sent to customers for their ebook store, reminding them that, as announced in April, the company is getting out of the ebook business because it wasn't profitable enough for them, and when they do, they're going to shut off their DRM servers, which will make the books stop working.
Almost exactly fifteen years ago, I gave an influential, widely cited talk at Microsoft Research where I predicted this exact outcome. I don't feel good about the fact that I got it right. This is a fucking travesty.
We're just days away from the "early July" shutdown. And Doctorow elaborated on his feelings in a blog post in April: This puts the difference between DRM-locked media and unencumbered media into sharp contrast... The idea that the books I buy can be relegated to some kind of fucking software license is the most grotesque and awful thing I can imagine: if the publishing industry deliberately set out to destroy any sense of intrinsic, civilization-supporting value in literary works, they could not have done a better job.
Almost exactly fifteen years ago, I gave an influential, widely cited talk at Microsoft Research where I predicted this exact outcome. I don't feel good about the fact that I got it right. This is a fucking travesty.
We're just days away from the "early July" shutdown. And Doctorow elaborated on his feelings in a blog post in April: This puts the difference between DRM-locked media and unencumbered media into sharp contrast... The idea that the books I buy can be relegated to some kind of fucking software license is the most grotesque and awful thing I can imagine: if the publishing industry deliberately set out to destroy any sense of intrinsic, civilization-supporting value in literary works, they could not have done a better job.
Hardly a huge prediction. (Score:1, Informative)
Given how well their previous attemts at DRM laiden walled gardens turned out, almost everyone predicted this. Cory was hardly being especially prophetic.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Re: Hardly a huge prediction. (Score:4, Insightful)
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It's not even DRM per se. When you "buy an ebook", you are not buying a thing, like an actual book. It's more like buying an extended warranty: you're purchasing a relationship with a vendor service offering. Vendor goes out of business, relationship is not possible, content is gone. Simple logic.
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Only there's no reason to buy a book as a service, it's perfectly possible to have a copy of the book that will remain usable forever.
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You seem to be under the delusion it's about what the consumer wants or needs. It's what the consumer can be persuaded to do, inadvertently if need be.
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Ya, customers can always be tricked and fooled, it's like a form of suspension of disbelief. Of course, all these companies and products that sprang into life over an extremely short five year period, they'll probably fade away just as quickly. The market is essentially for those who just want a temporary service until the fashion moves on, too bad they can't figure out that the price is too high for what is essentially a library rental.
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There are e-books without DRM. When my brother wanted a Kindle for Christmas I got him an alternative because Amazon had already done a claw-book of a title and so was clearly not going to be taking the high ground.
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And yes so many people keep defending DRM and continue to buy such products. For Steam, there are people who swear up and down that if it is ever shut down that there's an internal employee who will unlock it all before the lights go out. It's absurd, you can't separate "good guy" DRM from "bad guy" DRM.
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However, as this is just a statement from Valve and not something legally binding between the user and Valve, you need to trust that Valve will honor what they said should they go out of business.
Such things rarely happen anyway, not to large companies with valuable assets and customers. What is FAR more likely to happen is that Valve will be purchased instead of going out of business entirely, and their new owner or liquidator is under no obligation to honor any past verbal agreements. Or honor any of Valve's policies, for that matter.
Sierra On-Line was purchased by Vivendi and it's still lurking around as a brand name, despite the offices being vacated, the founders gone, the assets liquidated. A
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For me, on Steam, I don't need anything unlocked to play it. I have all 350+ of the games I've bought downloaded and installed onto disconnected drives and in an online backup service. I completely understand that one day, if Steam goes away AND my backup dies AND the company I pay for online storage goes out of business, (all within a couple days time), I will no longer have access to the games but I also know the feeling you get when someone breaks into your home and steals two decades worth of collectibl
A travesty? (Score:5, Informative)
You can read the books before then, and use the refund to re-buy a used copy if you want. You're still getting a full refund on the original purchase price, access to the books until then, and hopefully a good lesson on DRM.
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Yup, so long as there's a refund, not seeing much of a problem and agreed on the lesson on Digital Restrictions Management part.
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If only there was a way that consumers could somehow affect the law... ...scratch that, that's a crazy idea.
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How many eBooks did they sell? How many refunds will they be giving?
I find it hard to believe that giving all those refunds is cheaper than leaving the DRM server running on a CPanel or VPS in a data closet.
My VPS costs $10 per month.
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The cost isn't in the hosting, it is in maintaining the service, including security patches, both client and server side. That is a much more significant investment.
Plus, this is Microsoft, they are literally the second largest cloud provider in the world. The hosting costs are a non-concern.
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I'll one up ya... I have several KVM Linux vps that I pay $25/YEAR for... They're 512mb/30Gb SSD-cached with 1TB of monthly transfer. This is not some under-the-table special deal, anybody can get these..
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Of course, creating a DRM system that doesn't require server was far far too expensive to consider in the first place :-)
Re:DRM for National Security (Score:4, Informative)
But DRM is not just a fancy way of saying Copy Protection. DRM is far more than copy protection and far more insidious. Ie, witness Amazon who revoked all copies of a book that they felt was sold incorrectly - a brick and mortar store would never have seen out the goon squad to rip physical books out of the reader's hands, but with DRM everyone just assumed the digital equivalent was ok and there was no hue and cry made.
DRM means that the rights holder can revoke at any time, require you to use the content only in certain places, only on certain devices, the product can be updated and changed at any time. One purpose of DRM is to completely bypass any government granted rights to consumers because not all governments bowed deeply enough when content holders demanded stricter IP controls (content holders are not the same as content creators).
Re:A travesty? (Score:4, Funny)
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Being able to read the books for free?
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Ah yes, the "Disney Vault"
And this is why piracy thrives despite all of the hard and costly efforts to try to squash it.
Re:A travesty? (Score:5, Interesting)
A long as the books are still available. Sometimes books become unpopular, or are deemed offensive and it can be difficult to find copies.
Similar with movies. Try to find a legal copy of "pass the ammo" anywhere. It was pulled because it offended certain religious groups.
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A long as the books are still available. Sometimes books become unpopular, or are deemed offensive and it can be difficult to find copies.
Similar with movies. Try to find a legal copy of "pass the ammo" anywhere. It was pulled because it offended certain religious groups.
I seem to remember this place years ago. It was this building with all these things called books in it. If only I could remember the name....
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Which is a good reason to have both hard copy and online copies.
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What I was pointing out was that if too many books were to become DRM only, those books could disappear when their contents became objectionable. This isn't quite the same as censorship - they would not be "illegal" just no longer available, even to people who had already paid for them.
Its of course possible for real paper books to become illegal - but that is a much more draconian step.
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Is it? Please post a link - my VHS copy is worn out. I haven't been able to find legal copies anywhere. Lots of trailers, but not the full movie.
Yes, could steal it, but its just entertainment, not "important" and I'm not going to break the law (no matter how trivially) to watch a fun movie.
Seriously, if you found link it would be great
Re:A travesty? (Score:5, Insightful)
IOW, the fact that customers are getting a refund is an exception to how this situation would normally play out. This case isn't evidence that there's no problem with DRM.
Re:A travesty? (Score:4, Interesting)
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Is there ANY scenario at all when just breaking DRM is immoral in itself (not with distributing or anything on top, don't come with "oh what if you break DRM and then share the crap to get some pennies for X-BET ads")?
It will just make things better for you and no change whatsoever for anybody else if you have access to your PC for example to "your book" instead of having it only on a Kindle or Android device or whatever.
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And it's otherwise legal to do so since you already purchased it, barring silly countries that make decrypting illegal.
Yes, a travesty. A theft too. (Score:2)
The copyright is supposed to be transfer of ownership while keeping the work owned by the author for commercial exploitation, this reneges on that deal. Copyrights are supposed to be temporary rights and lead to the work going to the public domain, but this reneges on that deal. We should abolish copyrights now that the copyright owners have refused to keep their side of the bargain.
Re:A travesty? (Score:5, Insightful)
It's a travesty for Microsoft. They spent 15 years of effort, only to have to refund all the money paid for it in order to avoid spending a further eternity on maintenance/support.
For the publishers, of course, it's a huge win. They got paid their cut of the DRMed purchases, they got Microsoft to do the work and some marketing for them, and now the refunds funded by Microsoft will be spent on buying new copies of the books. Beautiful. Expect publishers to try that much harder to push DRM now.
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Travesty means "a false or misleading representation of something," not a misdeed or crime.
TRAVESTY (Score:3)
Travesty means "a false or misleading representation of something."
Travesty does not mean "a tragedy" or "a crime."
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Travesty means "a false or misleading representation of something."
Travesty does not mean "a tragedy" or "a crime."
The two aren't mutually exclusive. Sometimes they're complimentary.
But yes, strictly speaking, you're correct: travesty does not mean "a tragedy" or "a crime."
I think Microsoft may indeed have mislead or falsely represented their 'service' as a 'purchase', but that's for the lawyers to argue over.
As for the users who were dumb enough to rely on Microsoft for anything, they really, really should have seen this coming after the PlaysForSure debacle.
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As for the users who were dumb enough to rely on Microsoft for anything, they really, really should have seen this coming after the PlaysForSure debacle.
My response to Microsoft has long been a combination of fear and hatred. When I see putatively smart people deeply invested in the MS ecosystem, enthusiastically embracing it, I try to take it as a reminder that "I don't know everything, I'm not always right, and I often miss obvious things".
Still, come on, people.
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I try to take it as a reminder that "I don't know everything, I'm not always right, and I often miss obvious things".
Still, come on, people.
Again, I agree. At the same time, I know from my past experience with Microsoft (both as a user and as a worker bee in Redmond) that by and large Microsoft as a company sucks dog sicks from top to bottom.
The stack ranking, the "show the flag" meetings, the super-anal documenting of utterly meaningless day-to-day activity, the backstabbing festivals, the work reviews by people who knew less than I did (quite a feat, actually lol) and the stick-up-the-ass attitude of most of the managers were just a few of t
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The stack ranking, the "show the flag" meetings, the super-anal documenting of utterly meaningless day-to-day activity, the backstabbing festivals, the work reviews by people who knew less than I did (quite a feat, actually lol) and the stick-up-the-ass attitude of most of the managers were just a few of the things that convinced me to never, EVER go back to any job at Microsoft.
Sounds like a great job to take with the intention of telling as many people as possible to fuck off in a two week period before they fire you. Preferably in front of as senior a person as possible.
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I don't buy an ebook until I know it's either DRM-free or one of the DRMs for which I have cracking software. This has made the MS DRM server shutdown painless for me. It has also lost authors and publishers money over the years as I've skipped books I'd otherwise have bought.
no (Score:2)
Travesty means "a false or misleading representation of something."
Pay for ebooks with DRM (Score:2)
LOL how quaint.
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Lollitly lol lol!
Imagine wanting to buy Thomas Dolby's autobiography and finding that Amazon are the only people who have it - nobody's ripped it off and uploaded it to that dodgy Russian service yet. Imagine shrugging and telling yourself you didn't really want to read it, lollity lol lol lol.
(I bought it on Amazon, but that's another anger-inducing story)
How times have changed. (Score:4, Insightful)
If you resurrected all of our ancestors and told them that your "book" stopped working because of some DRM thing, they would shake their heads.
Re: How times have changed. (Score:1)
If you resurrected your ancestors and introduce them to internet porn....
They wouldn't care about anything else.
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Sorry, you're not allowed to read this part of the constitution where it talks about freedom of speech, because... well, we locked it up with DRM. Just trust us when we say there is no such section.
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or you can tell your friends about the high acid content paper books you bought ten years ago that are almost brown as shit.
I would say that copyrights have destroyed more (Score:2)
OTOH, the copyrights being enforced in various nations, and US continuing to push for longer copyrights, as opposed to allowing new books to be written about mickey mouse, etc. is far more destructive.
This is why they can neverr kill piracy (Score:5, Insightful)
The fact that they can remove your ability to use something you bought is and should not be acceptable. The fact that this DRM makes the experience worse as well as leaving the buying at the whims of the company is sad and makes people remember the books they get from a certain bay will never stop working because someone turned off a server or justy flips a switch to revoke access. Piracy is a service problem and Microsoft is just proving that true again. It is sad that they are so greedy, yet companies will only blame piracy when they ignore this big problem staring them in the face.
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I have a technical question (Score:3)
What is the most technically feasible and ethical way of not screwing the customers in this situation?
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Unlikely. The books are almost certainly encrypted with PlayOn or some equivalent DRM system that requires public/private keys to match up in order to decrypt the books.
Having said that, Microsoft could release a patch to their eBook system that allows the user to save an unencrypted copy-- but that would almost certainly be a violation of whatever agreement Microsoft entered into with the publishers when they bought the rights to sell electronic versions of non DRM encumbered books.
Re:I have a technical question (Score:5, Interesting)
The bigger problem is licensing probably. Microsoft doesn't own the books so they have to stick with whatever agreements they have with the publishers, and I'd imagine "making books DRM-free" isn't one of the things they're allowed to do.
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This isn't a technical limitation... it is a legal limitation.
Do you think that the book publishers who agreed to sell their books under the original system would allow what you describe to occur?
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Calibre has plug-ins that can remove DRM from some formats, but I don't know what Microsoft is using specifically.
Alternatively head over to The Pirate Bay and grab copies of all the ones you already own. It's not theft if you already own them, right? And it said "buy now", not "rent now", so you do own them.
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Microsoft couldn't even legally sell you those books, so no, you don't own them. You may have a fraud case against Microsoft. Good luck!
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It really seems to me that the cheapest solution for Microsoft, and the easiest solution for customers who then wouldn't have to make an effort to re-buy their property, would be for Microsoft to negotiate a bulk discount with Amazon or another e-book company to provide the books. BUT - that would probably involve giving a profit to a competitor, since most of the other e-book providers that could handle it would be?
Ayup. If you want my dead tree versions of (Score:3)
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the United States Constitution
User name checks out.
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Everyone in America seems to love the constitution, but I get the impression not many people actually read it - and even fewer understand just how much compromising and negotiation went into crafting the document. It's treated as a holy relic, the blueprint for perfect government handed down to the founding prophets. There's a lot of things in there that made sense at the time, but really don't fit very well today - and a lot of court rulings needed to understand how the constitution has been reinterpreted
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If you graduated high school in the US before about 1968, you probably have read the Constitution at least once. I remember my US History course spending quite a bit of time on the "compromising and negotiation [that] went into crafting the document." No one ever tried to pass it off as a holy relic or a blueprint for perfect government. It's just the set of rules for the US government. IMHO, the only parts that don't fit very well today have been the parts limiting Federal powers that have been neutered by
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Books-as-a-service. (Score:5, Interesting)
Would it be possible for Microsoft to contact authors/publishers and give them a list of contacts that they can send non-DRM copies of the digital versions of their books to?
Microsoft isn't going away soon - this isn't too much to ask.
All public DRM systems should be absolutely required to have a deadman-release of non-DRM versions of software sold at in public marketplaces.
Anything short is death of culture, and 'protected' works in that case shouldn't get access to copyright.
That is, if the point of copyright is to promote the progress of science and the useful arts across the theoretical long term.
Allowing the works to die before copyright ends, defeats any interpretation of that.
Ryan Fenton
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what SHOULD be possible is that a large, multibillion dollar corporation keeps the fucking server up. they've got their own cloud, for fucks' sake, toss up a couple small instances and let 'em simmer *forever*. it literally wouldn't cost them anything; and would certainly be cheaper than the inevitable lawsuits* that will be filed.
*and this is one prime example of why forced arbitration clauses must be outlawed.
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For certain definitions of "soon". As a result of this, its credibility is already one notch lower, and there can't be a lot more notches.
Cory's point (Score:3)
Well, clearly MS could send such a list. The publishers would certainly not send out fresh copies of anything, though.
Why would they? They are happily considering the additional sales they can look forward to as those customers replace their now-dead books.
Microsoft can't even break their own DRM and send out replacement copies because they are locked into the original contracts they signed with the publishers. These contracts require the DRM-based distribution.
All of this is Cory's point. This system w
Live by The Cloud, Die by The Cloud (Score:1)
Anyone that trusts any vendor's cloud (or cloud + DRM) is on borrowed time. I'm looking at you, people that bought music from iTunes and keep all their photos on someone else's server.
If you don't own the server... (Score:1)
then you don't own what's on it.
If you don't own your computing hardware and the software it is running, then you do not own any of the data you think you own.
It's really just that simple.
The cloud ... not yours. ... not yours. ... not yours. ... not yours.
Streaming videos and audio
Software as service
e-books
Dead tree books ... yours ... yours, even if crippled by DRM. ... yours.
CDs and DVDs
open source apps and OS
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Over the past 30 years, we've moved from being an ownership culture and a culture that appreciates the advantages of ownership, to a rental culture where you should no longer have any expectation of control. We are a culture that rents the works of others and puts up with the restrictions those others impose because *shrug* what are you going to do?
Samuel T. Cogsley warned us.. (Score:2, Funny)
"I've got my own system. Books, young man, books. Not in that homogenized, pasteurized synthesizer."
This is why I strip DRM (Score:5, Interesting)
I’m currently more in the Apple ecosystem, but we’re talking about the same sort of giant mega-corporation here.
People say things like “Don’t worry, we’re talking about a giant corporation not some fly by night operation, they’ll never go out of business.” But they don’t have to go out of business... if it doesn’t make sense on their internal spreadsheets, they can decide to just end your access - just like we’re reading about here.
If I can’t remove the DRM, I don’t buy the digital product - simple as that. I haven’t bought a movie from Apple since Requiem died. I continue to buy Kindle books, but the first thing I do after purchasing is strip the DRM and copy the ebook to a backup server.
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Libraries do have plenty of e-books you can check out, though. They buy them, just as they buy most of their paper books.
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I do checkout and read e-books from the local library - a lot more often than I buy them, actually. But I purchase books I will want to read more than once, just like I purchase movies I know I’ll want to occasionally re-watch.
FWIW I don’t strip the DRM off library e-books... just the ones I or my wife own.
Calibre (Score:2)
DRM is bad (Score:1)
The only winning move is not to pay.
PlaysForSure (Score:3)
Just like "PlaysForSure"...until it didn't. Lol, suckers.
Really, this kind of thing should be illegal.
"We'll sell you this thing, but later we can un-sell it to you if we feel like it."
Yes yes yes I understand it's a service blah blah blah, but still- you paid for something and now you no longer have it. What does it matter if you get your money back? Wasn't the whole point of your buying it was that you wanted it?
You bought it, you didn't rent it (or at least you didn't think you were renting it).
What if the bank decides to "un-sell" your house and they give you the money back? Or the car dealership wants to "un-sell" your car, "Hey, we want this back, here's some money".
I don't see how this is legal, but I'm sure there's a clause in the User Agreement on page 52, subsection C, paragraph 11.d that gives them the "right" to do this.
PlaysForSure all over again (Score:2)
So many companies have already screwed their own customers(and Microsoft are one of the worst) that I really can't feel sorry for consumer sheeple that even now still go ahead and buy DRM'd stuff held in a walled garden.
I mean surely at the time they bought it they must know somewhere in their tiny brains that cloud-based DRM means some faceless company still holds the cards so loosing all the stuff they bought is inevitable sooner or later.
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I don't understand that mindset, it's a convenience to have e-books on a nice reader like Kindle and those with money and jobs don't mind the expense (less money than paper books too). It's a bigger tragedy when your $1k or $2 PC motherboard finally craps out really. I can always just go back to paper books with a big magnifier if Amazon gets out of the book biz (pffft, as if)
I never trusted DRM'ed anything (Score:2)
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I don't care enough to give a shit. I like making fonts big on my kindle for easy reading by old eyes, and it's been great for eight years so worth the money. If the whole thing went away tomorrow I'd just shrug and go back to paper books but with big square magnifier, which is less convenient....
but Amazon ebooks work without internet (Score:2)
a Kindle will work away from the internet indefinitely , Microsoft did something silly
No Kidding? (Score:1)
No Kidding? A DRM product is going to go belly-up because of a change in the system? What a shock. Meanwhile I do not have anything from audible.com and won't until they are willing to sell me an MP3 of whatever they are selling. I don't have to fiddle with an mp3 to stick it on a thumbdrive and play it in the car. Just do it. That's what I want. Tie it to the DRM of some piece of hardware, it goes tits up when the hardware does, and then I've got no audibook for the remainder of my 5500 mile d
Zune (Score:2)
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Sincerely, an actual UW IS grad.
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NOTE: This post has many paragraph separators in it, I have no clue why they are not there when the comment is posted.
Set the posting mode to "Plain Old Text" mode at https://slashdot.org/prefs [slashdot.org]
Just about anything else has pretty broken whitespace.