Category Publishing
Kobo Gives the Shelfie Story a Happy Ending
The story of Shelfie, the Vancouver-based print and e-book bundling startup that ceased operations back in January, has a coda, and quite possibly a happy ending after all. Shelfie’s fellow Canadians at Kobo had agreed to maintain the Shelfie service so that users could access their DRM-protected e-books and transfer their e-book libraries to the Kobo […]
Readium LCP Set to Launch
The 2017 EPUB Summit in Brussels this past week was the venue for the beta launch and first live demos of the Readium LCP DRM technology for EPUB-formatted e-books. I’ve discussed aspects of the genesis and design of Readium LCP elsewhere: here is a summary that I presented at last year’s EPUB Summit in Bordeaux. […]
The Failure of Print and E-Book Bundling
How many times has this happened to you: you buy a print book, you start to read it, you go on a trip, you forget to take the book, you find the e-book version online, and you chafe at having to pay full price for another version of something you already have? The music industry […]
A Bounty Hunting Service for E-Book Piracy
We’ve been talking a lot here about blockchain applications for transaction processing in the music industry; in fact we had a panel on it at last week’s conference in NYC. Yet the latest application of blockchain technology to the media industry, from Custos Media Technologies, has nothing to do with music or royalty transaction processing. […]
Dutch Public Libraries and the “One Copy, One User” Rule
I took a little bit of heat from certain members of the library community who were bothered by my analysis last week of the European Court of Justice’s (ECJ’s) decision in the case of Vereniging Openbare Bibliotheken (Dutch Public Library Association) v. Stichting Leenrecht (Lending Rights Foundation, the Dutch collecting society for royalties from library lending) […]
The ECJ’s Inconclusive Ruling on Library E-Book Lending
We’ve been looking for a while at the question of whether First Sale rights apply to digital files. If you get an e-book or music download, can you resell, lend, or give it away to someone else — as you can with physical products like print books or music CDs? The library community has gotten excited […]
New Research on Impact of Copyright Monitoring on E-Book Sales to Be Presented at Conference
In what I think is becoming an annual tradition, I’m pleased to announce that we will be adding a new academic research presentation to the agenda at Copyright and Technology NYC 2017. Prof. Imke Reimers of Northeastern University in Boston will present a paper called “Can Private Copyright Protection Be Effective? Evidence from Book Publishing,” […]
E-Book Retail Platform Offers Choice of Watermarking or DRM
EditionGuard is a “white label” e-book retail platform that, like many of its type, is based on Adobe technology, including Adobe Content Server DRM. This week the company added an option called EditionGuard Social DRM, which enables its customers — publishers, retailers, and independent authors — to use e-book watermarking instead of DRM. EditionGuard Social DRM […]
Survey on E-Book DRM Licensing
If you have been following this blog for a while, you’ll know that I have been involved in the design and launch of a new open-source DRM scheme for e-books called Readium LCP (Licensed Content Protection). The formal launch of Readium LCP is expected to take place by the end of this year. As I’ve explained, […]
A World Without DMCA 1201
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) last Thursday filed a lawsuit against the U.S. government (the Attorney General, Library of Congress, and Copyright Office), in an attempt to have Section 1201 of the Copyright Act found unconstitutional. Section 1201 is the provision that makes it a violation of copyright law to circumvent (hack) DRMs and other “technical protection measures.” The nominal […]
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