[A2k] Re: [Upd-discuss] Fwd: Blind Groups Sue ASU flor Kindle Use

[Claude Almansi]

2009/7/1 Federico Heinz <fheinz@vialibre.org.ar>:
> On 30/06/2009, Norbert Bollow wrote:
>> Federico, don't you agree that the freedom of access to knowledge is
>> threatened by the risk that through the "Kindle", Amazon might succeed
>> in creating for itself effectively a gatekeeper role with regard to
>> access to knowledge?
>
> Not really. The risk of a Kindle monopoly doesn't seem all that high to me.
> Everything with a screen is being repurposed as a reader nowadays. The problem
> is not the Kindle, it's DRM, especially under DMCA-like conditions.

You forget  the threat of Amazon's virtual monopoly on copyrighted
e-books: and as Amazon offers them in a proprietary format for the
Kindle that cannot be read on other devices - with the only exception
so far as I know of the i-Phone - then there is a risk of a Kindle
monopoly on copyrighted books. Sure, the Kindle is also DRMed, but
here, the main barrier is the proprietary format.
>
>> [...] Such an alliance will succeed in turning the tide of international law
>> if and only if we succeed in building relationships of collaboration, trust
>> and mutual support between the diverse interest groups.
>
> And in order to do that, each and every one of the members of that alliance
> must fight for the whole thing, and not just for their specific portion. This
> means, always communicate that the problem is "access to knowledge" and that
> "access to knowledge for the {blind, poor, illiterate, dark-haired}" is just an
> illustrative example of the general damage being done.

Why do you mind so much strategically explicitating the various
aspects of  "access to knowledge" issues? DRM may well be a central
node, but non-tech-minded folks are more likely to understand - and
empathize with - the problems it causes for blind people.

>
> Those universities' plans with the DRM'ed books read like they got the idea
> from Richard's "Right to Read".

Sorry: I don't understand the sentence above: can you please reformulate it?

> It affects blind students, it is true. But it
> also affects all students.

No one has denied this. But again: you can sue when there is a law,
and there is no law against peeving off students with DRMed rot,
whereas there is a law against preventing blind students' access to
knowledge by adopting DRMed rot they can't use at all.

>
> What's worse, we can't count on textbook publishers acting stupidly *all* of
> the time. At some point, one or more of them is bound to figure out that the
> lock on the Kindle's text-to-speech feature is a completely boneheaded idea,
> particularly for books which are not likely candidates for audiobooks (say,
> Calculus 101), and allow the feature for them. As a result, those universities
> will be perceived as being concerned with the rights of the visually impaired,
> and doing the right thing for them, when in fact they will be doing the wrong
> thing for everyone.

Your choice of a Calculus 101 book as something blind people are not
likely to want an audio version of proves that you badly need to sit
next to a blind person for a couple of hours and let him/her explain
what s/he can do with an e-text.

Textbook (and even normal book) publishers are not stupid. But they
too are largely ignorant of how blind people read e-texts. And
publishers are presently so obsessed by their belated discovery that
digital things can be duplicated, and by their doomed striving to
prevent this  duplication, that they can't think straight. And so they
get conned into believing that DRM can prevent duplication, and that
disabling text-to-speech through DRM will protect their assets.

Take the Google Books Settlement, resulting from the US publishers and
authors class action. On their demands, Google will have to prevent
users of full copyrighted "orphan texts" from printing and/or
copy-pasting more than a fraction of each text. The DRM on the
presently partially offered Google books can easily be bypassed either
by saving the whole page and fishing out the relevant text images from
the folder of non-text objects, or by making screenshots.

But then - due to the American with Disabilities Act - the Settlement
also says that Google will have to make these same texts aurally
accessible to blind people. And that's were things get interesting.
Because there may be a DRM trick that will prevent users from making
screenshots or from saving the whole page.

There might even be a DRM trick that will prevent users from saving
the aural version from within a computer. But no DRM trick can prevent
users from recording the aural output with an external device. They
won't get  an "audio performance", but an audio file that will be more
clumsy to use than a properly formatted e-text you can navigate back
and forth in using titles and content map, but that will be DRM-free.

Just like the DRM-free audio files blind people presently can, legally
may for personal use, and do make of their DRMed-for-the-blind e-texts
that should only work on a single device: as back-ups in case that
device breaks down, to read when they are traveling, or because a
spouse objects to sharing the matrimonial bed with a tower computer in
case a blind person wants to be able to read during an insomnia.

So if authors and publishers too coud be enticed/forced to sit next to
a blind person who would explain what s/he can do with e-texts before
they spout inefficient but peeving-off paradoxes aimed at protecting
their assets, this might well make them understand the inanity of
DRMing-for-the-blind, and hence of DRMing in general.

In case you / they don't know any blind person willing to enlighten
you / them,  the "Complaint filed against Princeton University"
<http://www.readingrights.org/465> page on the Reading Rights
Coalition site  contains a "Declaration Re: Princeton
University/Kindle DX" by Jane Foster, where she explains very clearly
the obstacles she has encountered for 4 years as a blind student at
Princeton.

Sincerely

Claude Almansi