From Defective By Design:
With the new school year starting, many students will head off to college for the first time.
For some, college offers a chance to learn about computing and even free software, or to use computers productively in their learning about other subjects. For others, college brings with it a new restriction to the house of learning: DRM. Some colleges are now requiring and even supplying DRM-laden hardware to new students in lieu of textbooks and other materials.
We're happy to announce that we will be presenting the Readers Bill of Rights for Digital Books at the Association of College and Research Libraries National Conference in Philadelphia, PA in 2011! We're excited to have a full hour for this presentation (a luxury!), and the RBR labs will be humming in the months leading up to the conference.
What follows is the proposal for our talk.
Enjoy the new theme, inspired by our favorite rights-robbing consumer goods!
Here are the slides presented April 30. 2010 at Iona College in New Rochelle, NY.
See the attachment for a free document format.
As readers of traditional print materials, we are already guaranteed all of these rights--and we should not be denied them due to the medium in which we are reading.
1. Ability to retain, archive and transfer purchased materials
2. Ability to create a paper copy of the item in its entirety
3. Digital Books should be in an open format (e.g. you could read on a computer, not just a device)
4. Choice of hardware to access books (e.g. in 3 years when your device has broken, you can still read your book on other hardware)
5. Reader information will remain private (what, when and how we read will not be stored, sold or marketed)
See the attachment for a free document format.
The Rights of Readers and the Threat of the Kindle
This is an apology for the way we previously handled illegally sold copies of 1984 and other novels on Kindle. Our "solution" to the problem was stupid, thoughtless, and painfully out of line with our principles.-- Jeff Bezos, Founder & CEO, Amazon.com
What happens to our rights as readers when books go digital? Librarian Alycia Sellie and technologist Matthew Goins will challenge the status quo of book digitization and argue that current digitization projects rob readers of well-established rights that they have held historically with print. More than just an issue of convenience, we will outline what changes when books go from print to restricted digital format. We will examine restrictive licensing agreements and closed technologies used in current digitization projects that deny readers long-held rights of fair use. Sellie and Goins will examine those private corporations who have invested in digital book projects and whether their principles are something that we as librarians, consumers and informed readers should accept or avoid.
Recordings and further information about this event are now up at: http://lacuny.org/committees-and-roundtables/committees/emerging-technol...
A collection of links, in addition to the resources below, is available at: http://delicious.com/alyciaaicyla/ebook
Battles, Matt. "The Book: Terms of Service." library ad infinitum. http://mbattles.posterous.com/the-book-terms-of-service and http://mbattles.posterous.com/terms-of-service-the-movie
Brantley, Peter. Digital Books and the Impact on Libraries. (Special Issue of "Library Trends"). Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008.
This is an apology for the way we previously handled illegally sold copies of 1984 and other novels on Kindle. Our "solution" to the problem was stupid, thoughtless, and painfully out of line with our principles.-- Jeff Bezos, Founder & CEO, Amazon.com
Can we trust private companies to replace the work of libraries? Do we long to curl up with an electronic device and divorce ourselves from that much-loved book smell? More importantly, what happens to our rights as readers and authors when books go digital?
For the Conference on Intellectual Property, librarian Alycia Sellie and technologist Matthew Goins will challenge the status quo of book digitization and argue that current digitization projects rob readers of well-established rights that they have held historically with print. More than just an issue of convenience, we will outline what changes when books go from print to restricted digital format. We will examine the restrictive licensing agreements and closed technologies used in current digitization projects that deny readers these long-held rights of fair use.
Exploring not only the current state of digital books, ebook readers and digital restrictions management, Sellie and Goins will talk about the history of printed books, freedom of the press, and the rights of publishers and readers. We will address implications for libraries, individual readers, and also those concerned with copyright, and access to--as well as ownership of --information. We will examine those private corporations who have invested in digital book projects and whether their principles are something that we as consumers and informed readers should accept or avoid.
