The Responsible Digital Citizen

Digital rights management is crucial to the future of eBooks

By Karl De Abrew

Copyright 2000 Adobe.com.
This article first appeared on Adobe.com. Reprinted with permission.

Electronic book readers are appearing as both hardware (the Rocket eBook) and software (Adobe® Acrobat® Reader). And while techies are throwing out printed manuals in favor of the searchable eBook, some publishers have been slow to repurpose their content for the digital world. So, what's holding them back?

Three words: digital rights management (DRM). This pivotal issue has already hit the software and music scenes; now eBooks are the digital goods under the content microscope. Traditional books enjoy a one-to-one relationship with their owner. Sure, you can photocopy them for a friend, but you'd spend a pretty penny to do so. Plagiarizing, or otherwise lifting large chunks of text, is mostly a manual effort - and pirates usually take the path of least effort.

Enter the electronic book: Now content can be extracted, copied, and distributed in a matter of seconds - not just locally, but worldwide. There go the royalties and that nice new condo Stephen King was planning to buy.

Industry analyst Forrester Research suggests that media and software firms are holding back on the digital release of premium material that generates over US$300 billion globally in other formats (print, CD-ROM, etc.) Why? Because they are reluctant to distribute content online without a way to protect it. Everyone wants to get paid. And if publishers are worried with 30 million U.S. households online, then imagine if Forrester's prediction of over 60 million by 2003 is proven correct. That's double the number of net-savvy Americans who may be able to access the latest Michael Crichton novel free online at hotbookz.com instead of paying up at their local Borders bookstore.

Sounds quite dire - what can be done? Whether you're a publisher looking for ways to protect your vast content library, or an author looking to self-publish, you have a variety of options at your disposal. For instance, you could lock up the transport and delivery mechanism. This is an easy add-on solution, and once unlocked, the content can be freely distributed. Examples of solutions that use this method are BroadCastSoft's Suite 4.0 or even a protected WinZip file.

Alternatively, you could lock up the content and then incorporate unlocking within the viewing application. This is preferable and is addressed by solutions such as Adobe's PDF Merchant™ and Web Buy technologies. By building the encryption strategy into the file specification and viewer, you make it much more difficult to extract valuable content.

There is one more solution to this problem: Follow the Open eBook example and ignore it. The Open eBook working group defines DRM as being "orthogonal to the creation of an open rich content encoding scheme." Their methodology makes accessibility a priority at the expense of the protection of intellectual property. So while you may be able to read your eBook on a wristwatch, calculator, or microwave oven, you'll only have one title to choose from. As for the rest of us - wouldn't we prefer that the publishers had the confidence to release their premium content?

DRM solutions such as those from Adobe, InterTrust, and SoftLock turn the hyperconnectivity of the Internet to their advantage with superdistribution. Superdistribution allows you to legally pass on a copy of an eBook you have purchased to a friend or acquaintance. When the friend opens the content, they're prompted to purchase the eBook. Nice!

But with all this digital delivery hype, you have to keep in mind that DRM is only aimed at keeping the honest people honest - digital pirates will always be able to circumvent protection schemes. As Michael Moradzadeh, director of strategic planning and architecture at Intel, says: "One way [to copy] is to just go in and record in a movie theater. As long as humans have analog inputs - which will be true for a while - you'll be able to capture and redistribute content somehow."

Conscientious digital citizens accept that paying for content lowers prices and increases choice. So ask yourself: "Are you a responsible digital citizen?"