All the people up in arms about 1984 would probably get a heart attack if they found out what Microsoft did to people who were modding the Xbox and playing pirated games -
Anywhere between an estimated 600,000 and 1 million players who use Microsoft’s Xbox Live gaming service will be cut off from the service because they have modified their game consoles or played games that were illegally downloaded from file-sharing sites.
That’s between 600,000 and 1 million Xbox consoles (out of 20 million) locked out forever.
What does being banned mean -
- The banned Xboxes cannot connect to the Xbox Live service which is one of the big pluses of owning a Xbox i.e. no playing with other players, no downloading latest game demos, and so forth.
BBC has a round-up of reactions with some predictably angry people.
It’s good news for content creators though, and perhaps for people who don’t pirate
It’s pretty simple -
- People who pirate are subsidized partially by people who pay full price.
- People who pirate cause price increases and hurt sales.
If you’re creating high quality content or paying for high quality content, Microsoft’s move is great for you.
Why let people get for free what you pay for or work hard to create?
The whole ‘piracy is my right’, ‘sharing is my right’, ‘back-up copy is my right’ argument.
Have nothing to say on this. At all.
Is this good or bad for customers?
No opinion here either. Everyone has a different opinion – we should let the Courts decide this.
Could eReaders do something like this? What Could they do?
Actually yes.
- Every wirelessly connected eReader has a connection to the mothership.
- Every eReader company uses a modified OS so they can put in checks for piracy and controls and fail-safes.
- Every eReader company owns the portal to services like the ebook store and the Internet.
- Every ebook can have a unique identifier.
DRM is a very, very small step compared to everything that can be done.
What anti-piracy measures could eReaders incorporate?
- Companies can choose to stop selling eBooks (or even devices) to known piraters.
- Piraters could be locked out of the eBook Stores.
- There are other services (like WhisperSync, Free Internet, etc.) that could be denied to piraters.
- Piraters could have their eReaders frozen. This might be illegal – However, terms of service could be changed to make buying the device a contract with specified terms of use.
There’s just a lot that can be done because the eReaders are connected, the Operating system is owned by the eReader company, and eBooks can be tracked very well.
What anti-piracy measures could eBooks incorporate?
- DRM. This is already done.
- Self-destruct measures i.e. tampering causes the book to destroy itself.
- In-built signatures which would let companies know whose copy of an ebook was pirated.
- Trackers which could measure the path the pirated ebook follows.
eBooks can be made unique, can have unique IDs associated, and can have unique trackers included at very, very low costs.
There are simple, simple things that can be done such as giving each eReader a unique key and making sure that only it can open the eBooks earmarked for it.
What would an eBook piracy banning look like?
If an eBook was pirated and distributed (to say 5,000 people) you’d have -
- The person who cracked their ebook is identified (because of the ebook identifier) and charged.
- The 1,400 people who are repeat offenders are barred from all services and the ebook store.
- The remaining 3,600 people are told the book copy they procured is illegal and given a warning.
- The crack/loophole in the OS/channel is identified and blocked.
There would probably be a rash of court cases and some precedent would be established on what piracy is with respect to ebooks.
Random Thoughts on Piracy
- There’s still a lot of confusion in people’s minds about exactly what piracy is.
- There are still lots of reasons that people use to justify piracy. Some of which sound reasonable and some are amusing.
- People greatly reduce piracy and sharing if there’s a real fear of punishment i.e. people who would earlier say – I’m just sharing, would say – Not worth getting sued.
- There is currently no punishment for ebook piracy, and lots of rewards (free books). Just too tempting.
- People’s current inclination to assume ebooks are worth just $2 or $3 hints at how easy it will be for people to rationalize pirating $10 ebooks.
- Perhaps we should just think of it as a game of cat and mouse instead of right and wrong.
This is such a huge, huge issue and there is so much potential for disaster and controversy. It’ll be interesting to see if eReader companies go all-out against piracy.
Filed under: thoughts Tagged: | ebook piracy
“If you’re creating high quality content or paying for high quality content, Microsoft’s move is great for you.”
Not if you’ve bought an used xBox and it gets banned because of the previous owner.
“Everyone has a different opinion – we should let the Courts decide this.”
Current national laws are not suited for online piracy. Not suited and not updated fast enough to cover every new pirating system that pops-up every now and then. Not to mention that every country has different judiciary.
“Every wirelessly connected eReader has a connection to the mothership.”
This leads straight to situation like infamous Amazon’s 1984.
“Every eReader company uses a modified OS so they can put in checks for piracy and controls and fail-safes.”
There’s always some work-around. Always.
“Every eReader company owns the portal to services like the ebook store and the Internet. ”
You can’t make those companies own such portal, there will always be a company that will sell ereader alone, with no content whatsoever.
“Self-destruct measures i.e. tampering causes the book to destroy itself. ”
Again – Amazon and it’s infamous 1984.
“In-built signatures which would let companies know whose copy of an ebook was pirated. ”
You’ve forgot about ebooks that are not downloaded. They can be scanned and sent to an ereader by cable.
Also there is a specific DMCA exemption that allows for some types of backups. And they are reasonable.
For instance I was going through my music over the weekend and realized that dozens of my digital albums were gone. I have a backup system that caught some of them. But others had been done longer than the backups are held. Some stores allowed me to download again, some did not. It wasn’t the store’s fault that I lost the music. But reasonable backups really are needed for digital content. It is too easy to accidentally loose something.
Amazon and some that have backup storage can get around the backup issue because they allow for lifetime cloud storage. And people seem to trust Amazon right now. But I have had DRM servers shut down and loose dozens of books, not because I lost them but because the store shutdown and I could no longer open the books.
Had I stripped the DRM I would still be reading those books.
There is definitely a need to have a back-up storage in the cloud and have some sort of storage on your PC. What the Kindle allows for example is close to ideal.
What happens if your whole company disappears? That’s a tough one.
I think that piracy has to be tackled and if you are guilty of piracy or knowingly buying pirated copies then I believe you should expect and deserve to be ‘punished’. Whenever I am asked if a program disk could be borrowed my answer is always the same. “No. Buy your own!”. There are always going to be problems in protecting original work but that should not stop companies from trying. Most (but certainly not all) of us, I believe, are honest people and the protection methods need to reflect this, they need to be reasonable and as non- intrusive as possible.
I tend to think that the one of the major issues here is personal privacy. If I own a device (eReader, computer, mobile phone, etc) I feel I have the right to privacy of my device and the files on it. If companies have a way to check for pirated files, then my privacy is lost – I’m sure this is exactly how users felt after Amazon yanked their copy of 1984.
As for piracy, yes, it is happening right now. And no, there’s nothing concrete that can ever be done about it. Every time companies come up with a way to combat piracy, there will be hundreds of “regular” people out there that create better ways to pirate content. The collective knowledge of the “pirate” community is larger, more advanced and more powerful than these companies can ever hope to have.
So what can these companies do? Make it easy and most consumers won’t even think about pirating content. If it’s easier to go to a site like Hulu.com and watch a video versus illegally downloading it, why not do it that way? If you can stream a movie from NetFlix, most will choose that over a pirated copy. So what if I want a copy of a movie to keep? If they make it easy for me to download it to my laptop, transfer it to my PC, phone and whatever device I want, then that’s the way I’ll go.
My point it that publishers and other content creators need to stop spending time and resources on combating piracy. Instead they need to develop platforms and tools for consumers to get content easily and the way they want it. This will be there best defense against piracy.
I was a bit dismayed to see that “backups” were listed as “piracy”. If I buy a protected CD and physically break it, by say removing it from its case, then I would expect the manufacturer to replace the CD if I am not allowed to make a backup copy. This has happened to me, I did feel cheated and my action was to add that company to my defecation roster and never do business with it again. Some may think this is harsh on my part, but I think it comes under the heading of “Cheat me once, shame on you, cheat me twice, shame on me”.
I’m clearly saying there is no opinion on those. Not listing those as piracy.