Press Release - Will the Growth of Digital Books be stunted by Digital Rights Management?

The Digital Book Industry work towards a Solution at the TextOneZero New York 2001 Conference.

May 18 2001

New York, NY. The near complete failure of Digital Rights Management to facilitate revenue generation on the internet must not be repeated within the book industry – this is one of the major concerns that will be addressed at the TextOneZero New York 2001 conference on May 22-23.

Benoit Muller (Secretary General, International Publishers Association) and Patricia Schroeder (President and CEO, Association of American Publishers) will be joined by Brad Templeton (Chairman, Electronic Frontier Foundation), regarded as the world’s first ePublisher, as well as Jim Griffin (CEO, Cherry Lane Digital and co-Founder, Evolab) and Bob Bruce (Executive Director, The Open eBook Forum) in the Digital Rights Management panel discussion.

"As a former eBook publisher, I know that getting the public to accept eBooks is a hard enough challenge as it is. DRM systems which makes books less friendly and deprive people of the abilities they had with paper books are unlikely to help the industry thrive. But a greater global concern is that some pushes for DRM are trying to drive the copyright equation the other way, leading to laws that violate the First Amendment and alter the rights of citizens," says Templeton, addressing the practical and legal aspects of the DRM issue.

Jim Griffin, one of the world’s leading online entertainment visionaries, who will be addressing the digital publishing industry for the first time at TextOneZero, adds, "The most effective forms of Digital Rights Management attack the motives for piracy, not their mechanisms. Bottom-line, digital rights is about rewarding creators, not controlling content's quantity or destiny."

The restriction on usability that DRM causes is seen as a potential stumbling block by Bob Bruce who suggests, "ePublishing rights holders should have simple and effective DRM options available to them, and those options should be as invisible as possible to consumers."

This discussion is just one of twenty-one sessions covered by the conference, examining issues such as digital delivery, flexible display technologies, digital libraries and peer-to-peer systems.

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