- Telsta Scores Patent Win over Amazon (ZDNet) — The delegate of the Commissioner of Patents, Ed Knock, found this week that Amazon’s 1-click buy facility “lacks novelty [and] an inventive step”, making Amazon’s claim unpatentable.
- The Final Answer for What To Do To Prevent Piracy (Jeff Vogel) — His advice is to do the minimum to encourage people to pay, as Anything beyond that will inconvenience your paying customers and do little to nothing to prevent piracy.
- alpha.gov.uk — an experimental prototype of a single interface to all government services. Governments have been trying these for years. This one’s different–it’s not built by the highest bidder, it’s the result of a lean team headed by the stellar Tom Loosemore (ex-BBC). It’s prototyping the idea of using lightweight reusable syndication-friendly components (decision trees, calculators, guides, etc.) to build such a site. My suspicion, though, is that government websites are a people problem not a technology problem.
- A StackExchange for the English Language — what’s the collective noun for pedants?
"DRM" entries
A premium layer for web-based content
ValoBox looks to make premium (and locked) content accessible.
By removing the "hoops, headaches, and hangovers" of traditional online book buying, CompletelyNovel co-founders Anna Lewis and Oliver Brooks hope their company new company, ValoBox, will streamline ebook consumption.
Four short links: 12 May 2011
One-Click Zeroed Down Under, Piracy, One Site To Rule Them All, and English Language
4 ways DRM is like airport security
The failings of DRM become clear when viewed through a different lens.
The similarities between digital rights management and airport security go beyond near-universal dislike. Comparing the two shows the failings of both.
Four short links: 14 March 2011
Future Retrospective, Political Entrepreneurs, Library DRM, and In-Database Analytics
- A History of the Future in 100 Objects (Kickstarter) — blog+podcast+video+book project, to have future historians tell the story of our century in 100 objects. The BBC show that inspired it was brilliant, and I rather suspect this will be too. It’s a clever way to tell a story of the future (his hardest problem will be creating a single coherent narrative for the 21st century). What are the 100 objects that future historians will use to sum up our century? ‘Smart drugs’ that change the way we think? A fragment from suitcase nuke detonated in Shanghai? A wedding ring between a human and an AI? The world’s most expensive glass of water, returned from a private mission to an asteroid? (via RIG London weekly notes)
- Entrepreneurs Who Create Value vs Entrepreneurs Who Lock Up Value (Andy Kessler) — distinguishes between “political entrepreneurs” who leverage their political power to own something and then overcharge or tax the crap out of the rest of us to use it vs “market entrepreneurs” who recognize the price-to-value gap and jump in. Ignoring legislation, they innovate, disintermediate, compete, stay up all night coding, and offer something better and cheaper until the market starts to shift. My attention was particularly caught by for every stroke of the pen, for every piece of legislation, for every paid-off congressman, there now exists a price umbrella that overvalues what he or any political entrepreneur is doing. (via Bryce Roberts)
- Harper-Collins Caps eBook Loans — The publisher wants to sell libraries DRMed ebooks that will self-destruct after 26 loans. Public libraries have always served and continue to serve those people who can’t access information on the purchase market. Jackass moves like these prevent libraries from serving those people in the future that we hope will come soon: the future where digital is default and print is premium. That premium may well be “the tentacles of soulless bottom-dwelling coprocephalic publishers can’t digitally destroy your purchase”. It’s worth noting that O’Reilly offers DRM-free PDFs of the books they publish, including mine. Own what you buy lest it own you. (via BoingBoing and many astonished library sources)
- MAD Lib — BSD-licensed open-source library for scalable in-database analytics. It provides data-parallel implementations of mathematical, statistical and machine learning methods for structured and unstructured data. (via Ted Leung)
What if a book is just a URL?
A software company and an Australian bookstore are experimenting with books in the cloud.
Australian indie bookstore Readings is in full experiment mode with a cloud-based pay-for-access model. Software and ebook files don't play a role — everything is done through the browser.
Open question: How is your publishing organization addressing DRM?
If DRM's impact on piracy is negligible, what's its real purpose?
If digital rights management doesn't hinder pirates, and one-click stripping solutions are on the horizon, why do publishers turn to DRM?
Publishing News: Week in Review
An easy how-to on stripping DRM, venture capitalism hasn't dried up yet, and new ISBN ISO standards may be underway.
This week, Wired Magazine and Apprentice Alf schooled everyone in DRM stripping; LOLcats, social publishing and cloud archiving topped venture capital interests; and it may be time to move a digital ISBN ISO beyond an industry "recommendation."
With tools like these, DRM won't stop pirates or anyone else
Like it or not, push-button removal of ebook DRM is getting closer to reality.
Removing digital rights management locks from ebooks used to require technical wizardry, but new tools are lowering the barrier to entry.
Four short links: 17 January 2011
De-DRMing eBooks, Chinese Data, eBook Pricing, and Universal Translation (soon)
- Remove DRM from EBooks — it’s been done, and the tools are getting easier to use. The Kindle DRM-remover uses gdb to hook into the Kindle for Mac application, watch when a book’s decoded and snaffle the key. (via BoingBoing)
- AliBaba’s Data Possibilities (The Economist) — Alibaba has a huge and barely exploited asset: the data it has gathered on the spending habits of China’s emerging middle class. The firm is cagey about what, exactly, it will do with these data, and insists that it will not violate anyone’s privacy. Nonetheless, there are ways in which Alibaba could profit from what it knows. One idea might be to use customer data to identify trends and so help companies to anticipate what consumers want. Given the paucity of accurate data in China, this would be extremely valuable.
- Agency Pricing — Under agency pricing, the publisher controls the price and the retailer is not allowed to discount […] under Agency Pricing and with a reduced sales price of $9.99, the agency publishers are making the same amount of money as its hardcover revenue. (via Hacker News)
- Google Translate for Conversations — Because this technology is still in alpha, factors like regional accents, background noise or rapid speech may make it difficult to understand what you’re saying. As Douglas Adams said, by allowing everyone to understand each other, the babel fish has caused more wars than anything else in the universe.
Book piracy: Less DRM, more data
Brian O'Leary on why publishers should tackle book piracy with open minds and lots of data.
Brian O'Leary, founder of Magellan Media and a speaker at TOC 2011, discusses the difficulties of measuring book piracy and the benefits piracy could create for publishers.