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

[Claude Almansi]

Thanks for the reference, Michael and Federico. My brain tends to
freeze when authors are mentioned just by their first names. It comes
from having once had to wade through heaps of stiff-boring secondary
"gender studies" literature about Aphra Behn by lady dons who called
her "Aphra" as if they had herded pigs together.

But re your use of Richard Stallman's short story, Federico: the
people who chose to adopt the Kindle for universities may not be very
tech literate and hence may not understand the implications of its
tech restrictions. But they are likely to be literate enough in
general to get the message of the story. So if they had read it, I
doubt their reaction would have been "Yeah, let's be identified with
the censors in that story and adopt the Kindle".

This passage at the beginning:

"This put Dan in a dilemma. He had to help her=E2=80=94but if he lent her h=
is
computer, she might read his books. Aside from the fact that you could
go to prison for many years for letting someone else read your books,
the very idea shocked him at first. Like everyone, he had been taught
since elementary school that sharing books was nasty and
wrong=E2=80=94something that only pirates would do."

very accurately describes the paradox of existing "limitations to the
restrictions of copyright" that stipulate that DRM-free copies can be
made for blind people, but that these copies should only be usable by
the persons they were intended for (hence re-DRMed). Can a blind
person be sued for not having a separate password-protected account on
the family computer, if a parent or sibling or child then copies from
such a text (or makes a screenshot if copying is DRM-disabled)?

best


Claude

2009/7/2 Federico Heinz <fheinz@vialibre.org.ar>:
> On 01/07/2009, Claude Almansi wrote:
>> > 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?
>
> Since someone already had mentioned it and people seemed to understand, I
> thought most of us would know it. It's a short story by Richard Stallman,=
 you
> can read it at <http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html>.
>
> =C2=A0 =C2=A0 =C2=A0 =C2=A0Fede
>

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