Now They're Being Really Annoying

I don't generally get riled up. I think (hope?) that people who know me well would say that it's not in my nature.

But this immediately pushed my to a rolling boil.

<http://www.libraryjournal.com/lj/home/889452-264/harpercollins_caps_loans_on_ebook.html.csp>

So - having created and ... provided ... the ebook to a library, they are going to *actively* move to disable it after 26 checkouts!

Up to now, I've felt that DRM in library books was reasonable. I'm not buying them for the long term, I'm borrowing it for three weeks. And it didn't strike me as unreasonable for a library to have the wherewithall to protect its assets - including ebooks - into the long term, much like they have sprinklers in the ceiling to protect the print books.

But this simply strikes me as publishers abusing the power of DRM because they can. Moreover, should the *publisher* vanish after selling the book, it suddenly puts the ebook on death row, scheduled to stop working once enough people look at it.

In Canada, like many places, authors do get paid when a public library loans out a book. I'm having problems coming up with anything other than insanity or pure greed driving the change Harper-Collins is considering.

This reminds me of having read only minutes ago a quote from Francis Gurry, Director General of WIPO:

"we should constantly remind ourselves that the history of the confrontation of our classical copyright world with the digital environment has been more a sorry tale of Luddite resistance than an example of intelligent engagement"

Luddite resistance - in this case, trying to do as much as possible to make ebooks suffer under the same limits as paper books.

...Grrr.



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