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| Request for Input on DRM and eBooks for the Disabled |
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Monday, November 28 2005 @ 10:49 AM EST
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I got an email from Kevin Sesock, who works at Oklahoma State Univeristy in the Student Disability Services department. He'd like to pick your brain. There is a DRM solution called DAISY, and he wonders what you think of it. He has very specific questions at the end of the email, which I produce now, and I hope you'll help him find answers. On the DAISY website, there is this explanation: The acronym stands for Digital Accessible Information SYstem. Often, the term is used to refer to a standard for producing accessible and navigable multimedia documents. In current practice, these documents are Digital Talking Books, digital text books, or a combination of synchronised audio and text books.
DAISY is a globally recognized technical standard to facilitate the creation of accessible content. The standard was originally developed to benefit people who are unable to read print due to a disability, but it also has broad applications for improved access to text in the mainstream. . . .
Using the DAISY standard, content creators, such as a library serving people who are blind or visually impaired or a book publisher can produce accessible and navigable books to meet a variety of reading needs. In general, organizations can: -
Produce a Digital Talking Book (DTB) that enables a person to navigate through it in a way comparable to how a print book would be used. For example, readers can examine the book by page, section, or chapter, or use a table of contents or an index. In general, this goal may be accomplished by creating a structured text file integrated with a human-narrated audio file.
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Synchronize an electronic text file with an audio file to provide readers with the choice to examine the text and/or listen to the audio version of it.
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Generate an electronic braille file from the electronic text used to create the DAISY book.
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Produce a structured digital ''text-only'' document which can be read with a DAISY software player in combination with a braille display or speech syntesizer.
So that's what it does. The Working Group has set December 2005 as a deadline for completion of the DAISY DRM system design specification, so there is still time for meaningful input. One thing I notice is that on that same page, it says "All intellectual property used by the DRM system should be licensable free or at a reasonable cost so as not to place undue cost burdens on distributors. RAND stands for “reasonable and non-discriminatory” and refers to licensing terms." I wonder if the DAISY folks know that RAND licensing terms are a problem for FOSS, being specifically incompatible with the General Public License, the license that Linux is offered under? So, if those are the licensing terms for this standard, it would mean, I believe, that Linux can't use the standard, just like in the SenderID flap. Yet, you'll see that the working group have specified that DAISY "Should be implementable in an open-source playback system," so they are not hostile to FOSS. Unfortunately, something can be designated a "standard" without being open to all. This may be an educational opportunity. I'll let Kevin tell you the rest.
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I am the Assistive Technology Specialist at Oklahoma State University.
I've been following DAISY, a standard designed to provide electronic
text to persons with print disabilities (blindness, low-vision,
cognitive and learning disabilities), and I discovered today that the
DRM Working Group of the DAISY Consortium has come out with its System
Requirements Draft and is asking for comments from the public.
Ultimately, my goal as a service provider is to ensure access to persons
with disabilities. Part of that access involves accessible electronic
books, and from what I understand, publishers and some copyright holders
are concerned about providing books in electronic formats that are
completely unprotected, opening the doors for piracy. I believe that a
form of protection, be it DAISY DRM or any other, will remove the cause
of this concern and hopefully the last roadblock the publishers may have
to providing as many books as possible in electronic/accessible formats.
Right now, there are far too few accessible electronic texts available,
and this needs to change.
The questions and concerns I have with DAISY DRM are the same with any
other standard affecting access. I don't believe the keys to an
accessible electronic book format can work without allowing for open
source solutions and being a completely open standard. I believe that
industry standardized and open encryption schemes are necessary to
prevent security through obscurity. I know that privacy must be
addressed, as well as the potential revelation of personal data.
Each of these pieces fits together to provide access that is workable
for every party, from end user to publisher, and I hope the community
can help comment on the most successful standards, or if the DAISY DRM
implementation truly succeeds. While the DAISY DRM standards touch on
some of the pieces I mentioned, is it enough, or maybe too much?
Is DRM even a viable solution? How is DRM relevant or appropriate to
DAISY and to accessible e-books in general? Ultimately, my question
revolves around what will provide the most access to the most people,
and to achieve that, a lot of voices in the community should speak up to
find a best solution to fit all parties. My hope is that the community
will realize the need and help to provide access that meets the above
needs, either by offering advice to the working group, or creating
standards that do work.
Standards:
http://www.daisy.org/publications/drafts/DAISYDRMv2Reqs.htm
Information on how to submit comments to the working group:
http://www.daisy.org/publications/drafts.asp
General information about the DAISY format itself:
http://www.daisy.org/about_us/dtbooks.asp
Again, thank you for and to the GL site and community.
Kevin A. Sesock, A+, NET+, CNA, MCSA
Assistive Technology Specialist
Student Disability Services
Division of Student Affairs
Oklahoma State University
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| Authored by: overshoot on Monday, November 28 2005 @ 11:25 AM EST |
| Make links clickable if you would. [ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: overshoot on Monday, November 28 2005 @ 11:32 AM EST |
| My concern is over the whole concept of DRM being applied to books
(especially textbooks) for the disabled but not to those for the rest of
us.
About the only way I would even grudgingly have anything to do with DRM
(which, after all, is intended to restrict users) would be if there were a
cast-iron guarantee from the provider that they would bear the expense of
enabling purchasers to do everything -- no exceptions -- with their
restricted copies that they would legally be able to do with printed
copies.
Anything less than that puts the disabled in the position of de
jure second-class citizens, forbidden by the DMCA from doing things that the
rest of us are permitted by law to do. [ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Monday, November 28 2005 @ 11:42 AM EST |
While it is true that RAND licensing terms are not necessarily compatible with
the GPL, I think the reverse is true:
I would certainly consider the GPL "reasonable and
non-discriminatory". [ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: CnocNaGortini on Monday, November 28 2005 @ 11:46 AM EST |
| If any... [ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Monday, November 28 2005 @ 11:57 AM EST |
There was a time when people who distributed computer programs tried to prevent
copying. This led to a game of people beating the copy protection and the
distributors going to ever more sophisticated methods of copy protection trying
to find an unbeatable protection method. After I bought my first copy protected
program I solved the problem by refusing to buy any more since then.
Now copy protection on computers rears its ugly head in a new form, DRM. I have
extended my refusal to buy copy protected programs to anything protected by DRM.
Problem solved.
----------------------
Steve Stites
[ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: TiddlyPom on Monday, November 28 2005 @ 11:58 AM EST |
I guess this is slightly off topic but equally applicable.
I think that
there is a real problem with digital rights management in general and we are
rapidly heading towards the nightmare scenario highlighted in Richard Stallman's
Right to Read
article.
I guess the question should be
"Should the open source
community support and spread and use of digital rights management and is this
even possible if the source code is open for all to see or
modify?"
Personally I believe that DRM is a very bad thing both for
consumers (whether disabled or not) and the IT/multimedia industry in general as
it stifles innovation (in terms of different ways to view or use purchased
audiovisual media) and severely reduces choice in terms of what a consumer can
do with legitimately purchased media.---
"There is no spoon?"
"Then you will see that it is not the spoon that bends, it is only yourself." [ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: tz on Monday, November 28 2005 @ 12:53 PM EST |
Lets say Daisy DRM ends up supporting every assistive technology today. A few
years from now a new system, maybe some kind of retinal implant, or a braille
glove or something far better comes along. How do you plug it in to a DRM-ed
system?
You would need to come up with a driver, and grovel to the DRM consortia in
order to get them to grant you the digital signature blessing so it will work,
but only after you have assured them it won't leak information (and every update
will need a similar blessing).
This is the one thing about Linux and the rest of the opensource movement. If I
can find a neat way of doing something, I can bolt it in, or put it in the
middle of a pipe or whatever is needed. Linux isn't going to verify my display
respects macrovision. If I want to add captions or other subtitles, I can
simply write something and insert it into the stream. The technical
difficulties might be annoying, but are surmountable. If you have locked gates
which you first have to go through, forget it.
As an example of something simple, I have a new cell phone that uses something
called Brew from Qualcomm. I would like to develop a few simple programs just
to see what it can do. I can sort of do something in emulation on a PC. But if
I want to actually download a live program to a phone, I need a digital
certificate, and for that I have to pay a lot of money and fill out a bunch of
legal stuff. There are very few Brew applets and I see why. I can't compile
even one app I write and put it on my phone. Only a development house that
wants a commitment will go through the time and expense. I'm reasonably sure
they are RAND licensing terms.
This is probably the minimal level of DRM hoops that will happen under DAISY,
but it is a very high barrier.
One thing opensource allows for is small incremental improvements. If I can
make something better in some small way for 2 hours of work, it will happen. If
there are barriers, only large things can be done. There aren't a lot of people
who will spend hundreds on a dev kit and do all the signing just to fix a small
problem.
Looking back at the Linux kernel, the big leaps are more noticeable, but even
those are collections of months of a few small changes each day. Something
basically works. Then problems are fixed. It is made more efficient and clean.
Features are added, both hardware and the number of commands it supports. And
that still goes on today.
How do you introduce a correction into a DRM-ed work (say a paragraph was
mistranscribed)? How do you do something simple like index it (like all the
products that will find anything containing the word "scarlet" on my
computer - does that apply to DRMed works?).[ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: kawabago on Monday, November 28 2005 @ 01:03 PM EST |
Or at least that's what this sounds like to me!
---
TTFN[ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: wood gnome on Monday, November 28 2005 @ 01:56 PM EST |
Is the fear of the publishers.
Quote from Kevin's story: " from what I understand, publishers and some
copyright holders are concerned about providing books in electronic formats that
are completely unprotected, opening the doors for piracy".
Oh yesss, these electronic books for the disabled will of course be mass-pirated
(I'm thinking many millions of copies here, no less! - depriving the publishers
of billions of dollars!).
[end of rant]
Dear publisher/copyright holder: don't you have something like copyright? Has
that law - implementation been cracked, yet?
In the meantime, IMHO, RAND opens the door for non-RAND, will be misused and is
therefor incompatible with the open-source filosophy.
[ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Monday, November 28 2005 @ 02:38 PM EST |
An open letter to anyone even considering supporting DRM.
Unless it makes the thing protected totally inaccessible to anyone at all, no
DRM system can ever protect anything against copying. It merely makes it
slightly more expensive, in effort or ingenuity.
Protecting a text, at the limit, merely reduces to the same problem as making an
etext out of a printed book; and the success of Project Gutenberg (over 170,000
etexts from printed texts) shows how relatively easy that is. The "analog
hole" makes any audio property trivial to copy.
So DRM is not going to stop "pirates" making commercial copies of a
work, text or audio, if there is a market for it.
All DRM does is make life more difficult for, and reduce the rights of, the
honest people who might buy or otherwise accept a DRM product. It usually also
reduces the quality of the DRM product. If you are a seller of products, and
you use DRM, you are telling your customers, "I think you are all
thieves"; is this the impression you want to give?
This happened with software. "Copy protection" and registration
schemes added buggy limitations. I am totally honest about using (under what I
consider to be "fair use" provisions) software; I have never made an
illicit copy; but after early experiences with "copy protection", I
haven't bought a protected or registration-essential program in nearly 20
years.
It will take the bulk of people time to understand the effects and implications
of DRM, but they are the same, and people will come to understand them, and all
but the most stupid will reject them.
I will never buy a DRM product. I will never support a DRM initiative, and if
you have any sense, neither will you.[ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Monday, November 28 2005 @ 02:44 PM EST |
> So, if those are the licensing terms for this standard, it would mean, I
believe, that Linux can't use the standard, just like in the SenderID flap.
Now this isn't a true statement unless you're trying to integrate DRM into the
operating system. Otherwise, you can run any type of software with any maverick
or hostile licensing terms on Linux so long as you aren't trying to integrate
into the OS and the licensing terms don't put restrictions on the OS.
Jacob[ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Monday, November 28 2005 @ 11:02 PM EST |
| A little background on me.
Some people would call me a bibliophile. My
living room dining room and kitchen all have _full_ bookshelves and I still have
books in boxes. I also have a background in using cryptography. (I did PGP support for two years).
In my opinion, DRM is a
problem looking for a solution. When it comes right down to it, DRM depends on
being closed. Its goal is delivering information, but limiting that
information's usefulness and accessability. Crpytographically speaking the
attacker and the message recipient are the same. This leads to a situation
where, at leat to my understanding, an open solution _isn't_ possible. In order
to "protect" the information, I have to keep the end user from knowing how to
decrypt it. The only way to do that is if _I_ provide compiled binaries rather
than source. (And that still doen't prevent people from figuring out hot to
decrypt it, just from doing so legally in repressive areas like the USA.) That's
DRM from _my_ crypto standpoint.
From the standpoint of an end user;
experience tells me that any sort of binary or DRMed archive will prevent me
from acceessing/opening the data within a decade. (Microsoft is far from the
only offender here.)
For a discussion of the topic from a author/publisher
standpoint I refer you to Eric Flints comments on Baen's website.
Baen's Free Library [ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Tuesday, November 29 2005 @ 12:14 AM EST |
I'm a blind person, Windows and GNU/Linux user (accessibility isn't as good as
it could be under Linux yet). The Daisy format is already working, so this is an
attempt to add DRM on top of it.
If Daisy gets hobbled by DRM, that would be an important loss for blind people.
By the Berne convention, if my memory serves me right, we have some special
privileges with respect to Copyright. More specifically, we are not bound by
Copyright of books, so long as books are written in a format specifically
designed for our use (Braille is an example, Daisy would be another). There are
several reasons, some better than others, why we have this privilege, one of the
most important ones being that the authors are not going to do the printing
themselves, and those who do the printing can't easily do it without this
provision.
The point is, though, that if Daisy becomes the de facto format for
blind-friendly ebooks, as it may, the rights acquired by Berne would be
nullified by the interaction of private entities and the DMCA-like
anti-circumvention laws. I would be extremely adverse to such a result...
In the meantime, if you use Convert Lit you can convert ebooks in the Microsoft
Reader format to html, a format which most blind people have no problem using.
So using Daisy for blind people isn't going to reduce infringement (at least
while they keep on using week DRM such as that present on .lit files) but only
going to reduce the ability of blind people to access culture in the statutory
terms they are allowed to.
[ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Tuesday, November 29 2005 @ 03:19 AM EST |
| DRM and Open source CAN mix, but do not do so very well.
Reason: DRM is
nothing but encryption of content (say a text of a book).
Encryption needs 2
things:
- An encryption algorithm
- A key
If the publisher wants a
customer to be able to read his book, he has to deliver both, algorithm and key
to the customer.
If the customer uses open source software, the algorithm no
longer would be secret. Additionally the software could easily be rewritten
(because it is open source) to intercept the key, or even to spill the content
into an ASCII text file.
Software DRM with open source software
cannot work, because always algorithm and key have to be given to
the customer.
It would be different with hardware DRM, here the algorithm
would be closed away in a chip, so the open source software would just give the
chip the encrypted message and the key and the chip takes over from there.
Disadvantage is, that as long as not every computer has a DRM hardware, not
every user can access the content.
So one way or the other people get
excluded for technical reasons. However, DRM until today did not prevent people
from illegaly copying content. Crackers will always find a way around DRM,
simply because they get handed algorithm and key.
My conclusion is, that
open source software is not likely to be accepted by content providers. Sorry
for all the people with disabilities out there, but open source e-book readers
will not get the official approvement of the content providers (they will be
seen as pirating tool), and closed-source readers will not hand over the content
to an open source text-to-speech program because someone could use that to spill
the content into a text file.
The only solution I see is, if content
providers make their e-book reader equipped with all gadgets a person with
disabilities might need, and provide that reader for every
platform.
I give everybody unlimited license to do whatever one wants to do
with above text. [ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Tuesday, November 29 2005 @ 11:46 AM EST |
DAISY is not itself a DRM system. It's a Digital Talking Book format. The
DAISY 2.02 and DAISY/NISO (Z39.86) specs have allowances for DRM, and there is
the DRM working group, but there is no DRM system that is yet endorsed by the
DAISY Consortium. The use of DRM is optional; the DAISY books that my employer has produced for years have been
DRM-free.
There is an LGPL DAISY software player, called AMIS. If you look around on SourceForge,
you can find some FOSS DAISY production software, although nothing full-blown.
(I'm hoping to do one myself in my copious free time.) [ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Friday, December 02 2005 @ 11:17 PM EST |
| Their web site says the requirements doc is to be finished
in January **2005**,
not 2006. I think it's too late to comment on it. Supposedly they are now
beavering away at designing a system that meets their DRM lockdown requirements,
though I've seen no evidence of that on the Daisy web site.
But if you look
at their Strategic Plan, adopted in April 2005, it
clearly shows that they have no idea what they're doing. As a simple example,
they're trying to define a new Daisy format (Daisy 3) and make tools that will
translate between Daisy 2.2 and Daisy 3, in both directions. DRM will
completely screw this. They have a special emphasis on making things work in
developing countries. DRM will completely screw that, too. They think
they're working on an "inclusive, global, accessible digital library". DRM will
screw that too; it's all about INaccessibility and DISinclusion, and market
segmentation. They haven't noticed yet; the plan is to add DRM anyway. They
have apparently never even heard of "DVD region codes" yet.
I had been
thinking that DAISY might make a nice format for enhanced books from the Open Library, which is scanning in large
numbers of public domain books and making them available for DOWNLOADING and
UNLIMITED USE (unlike Google Print). Then I could e.g. read aloud a chapter of
a children's book that I like, and upload that into the library for anyone to
listen to. But if they're going to crap it up with DRM, forget that format!
They can stick with their oddball format while the rest of the world passes them
by with OPEN formats.
Just like all the "Deaf TTY" folks with obsolete
protocols and hardware -- they knew at the time they standardized on it that it
was obsolete, but it saved them 12c, so they insisted. One of the larger
problems with the disabled community is that their culture is often so insular
that they continue to shoot themselves in the foot with unconscious
provincialism. [ Reply to This | # ]
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