121–130 of 173 posts
The amount of DMCA pull requests is staggering - every day there is a few: https://github.com/github/dmca/pulls?q=is%3Apr+is%3Aclosed
Here I am browsing all of this cool content via the WayBackMachibe. What a good repository of goodies!
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.
What can we do to oppose this idiocy that is trampling legitimate fair-use provisions of otherwise licensed content? It's been 10 years since the SOPA protests and while we may have stopped that three headed monster, the global situation with USA attempting to expand DMCA and similar measures to other countries is atrocious. Other than recent EU court rulings potentially expanding what constitutes fair-use in that te…
The EU should oppose this. I mean the publishers greased the palms of Senators and Representatives here, not in the European union thus they are owed nothing.
I almost always miss context in these cases. What did noDRM do? Or perhaps, from what was DRM removed/filtered?
What NoDRM allows is for that lending period to be broken, so that patrons (readers) can read the ebook they have borrowed forma public library indefinitely.
The practical consequence is that copyright owners (authors, publishers., etc) would in most cases cease to make ebooks available for lending.
In some cases Readium LCP is also used by ebook vendors (retailers), mostly small European ones, as an alternative to Adobe's RMSDK, but the LCP platform is constructed such that if you buy the ebook from one vendor that you can read it on the app of any other vendor using Readium LCP, even if their authentication server is different (Adobe always requires authentication through a central Adobe server, meaning the end user needs an account both with Adobe AND the vendor/library, something not required with Readium LCP). IT is the most interpoerable system available in the publishing ecosystem
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 co…
None of this changes the fact that the removed tools where the primary means for most people to unencumber content they own.
You have one paragraph dismissing DMCA and copyright, but that's the primary issue here. The fact that it's Readium issuing the DMCA notice instead of Amazon is immaterial in my opinion. The effect is the same.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There has to be a meaningful liability for sending defective DMCA notices. But there won't be, wrong times.
When the boomers die out, the zoomers are going to obliterate DMCA. Their only exposure to it has been "thing that pisses off fav content creators"
> I have taken fair use into consideration. I'm constantly amazed at how many people don't understand what "fair use" actually means. Many seem to think it means "I should be able to do this" or even "I'm only using part of a copyrighted work". This issue has come up recently on Twitch with restreaming of TV shows, movies, anime and, more generally, with Youtube and other content. Fair use [1] is a specific legal doc…
I hate mice, have had to deal with infestations a couple times now. Dirty, scumbags, causing me economic harm and trampling over my rights.
Plus the comp. you are talking about has known links to a repressive dictatorship. Burn-em I say.
What's the difference between this and Apprentice Alf's DeDRM tools repo which is still up?
Probably these bits: > The user noDRM is actively promoting the activity of cracking both library loans and one-off purchases: > https://github.com/noDRM/DeDRM_tools/issues/2#issuecomment-9... > This departs from the policy of the user [private], from which noDRM has forked the repository DeDRM_tools. The user [private] does not provide circumvention material for the LCP solution, therefore it is not part of our requ…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 2. You can't tell anyone how to circumvent DRM, regardless of purpose. This is the sort of violation being alleged here. I'm curious: why would this be the case? This is a restriction of speech that doesn't contain copyrighted content enacted by a copyright law. This seems like charging someone, by using an anti-burglary law, because they taught someone else how to pick a lock .
Just to give you an idea of how dumb this law is, try this for a hypothetical. Alice uses DRM to protect her copyrighted work. Bob uses the exact same DRM to stop you from copying public domain works, for example. You publish some code to break Bob's DRM. Is that illegal? The law shouldn't enable Bob to do that. But if you can have tools to break Bob's DRM, the tools will break Alice's DRM because they're the same, a…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Unfortunately, there are cases in which courts said approximately that implementing an algorithm (especially an algorithm that is a secret¹) without permission can be a violation of §1201. Recall (a)(3)(A) to “circumvent a technological measure” means to descramble a scrambled work, to decrypt an encrypted work, or otherwise to avoid, bypass, remove, deactivate, or impair a technological measure, without the authorit…
What happens if you print out the source code and publish it as a book? Can the courts prohibit a book? Phil Zimmermann asked this question in the context of export controls on "cryptography technology", i.e. the PGP software. MIT Press published the source code in 1995. But the US dropped its objections and this wasn't specifically tested in court (AFAIK, though similar questions were). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki…
Certainly under most European circumvention prohibition laws there's no requirement for the distribution of the circumvention tool to be done electronically, so yes, you could definitely prohibit a book.
(And books are prohibited in the likes of the UK by courts all the time for libel at al so it wouldn't be hard to see happening.)