Melville House Books

Cory Doctorow

Apple iPad infatuation? Cory Doctorow isn’t having any of it. In a rip-snorting commentary for Publishers Weekly, he says

Here’s what most mainstream press reports so far haven’t told you. The iPad uses a DRM system called “code-signing” to limit which apps it can run. If the code that you load on your device isn’t “signed,” that is, approved by Apple, the iPad will not run it. If the idea of adding this DRM to the iPad is to protect the copyrights of the software authors, we can already declare the system an abject failure–independent developers cracked the system within 24 hours after the first iPad shipped, a very poor showing even in the technically absurd realm of DRM ….

But DRM isn’t just a system for restricting copies. DRM enjoys an extraordinary legal privilege previously unseen in copyright law: the simple act of breaking DRM is illegal, even if you’re not violating anyone’s copyright. In other words, if you jailbreak your iPad for the purpose of running a perfectly legal app from someone other than Apple, you’re still breaking the law. Even if you’ve never pirated a single app, nor violated a single copyright, if you’re found guilty of removing an “effective means of access control,” Apple can sue you into a smoking hole. That means that no one can truly compete with Apple to offer better iStores, or apps, with better terms that are more publisher- and reader-friendly ….

Think about what that kind of control means for the future of your e-books. Does the company that makes your toaster get to tell you whose bread you can buy? Your dishwasher can wash anyone’s dishes, not just the ones sold by its manufacturer (who, by the way, takes a 30% cut along the way). What’s more, you can invent cool new things to do with your dishwasher. For example, you can cook salmon in it without needing permission from the manufacturer (check out the Surreal Gourmet for how). And you can even sell your dishwasher salmon recipe without violating some obscure law that lets dishwasher manufacturers dictate how you can use your machine.

Doctorow goes on with a line of brilliant analogies (and one that’s mis- or under-informed — the collapse of AMS didn’t really show “what can happen when a single distributor locks up too much of the business;” after all, another company, a hedge fund called Perseus, took over AMS’ publishing holdings such as PGW and more, and now owns 80% of indie publishing distribution, dwarfing AMS).

But even more intriguing is his belief that

There’s an easy way to change this, of course. Just tell Apple it can’t license your copyrights–that is, your books–unless the company gives you the freedom to give your readers the freedom to take their products with them to any vendor’s system. You’d never put up with these lockdown shenanigans from a hardcopy retailer or distributor, and you shouldn’t take it from Apple, either, and that goes for Amazon and the Kindle, too.

This is exactly what I’ve done. I won’t sell my e-books in any store that locks my users into a vendor’s platform….

I’m planning to be in the publishing business for a good half-century or more. And though I am not exactly sure how the e-publishing book business will mature … I am keenly aware that locking my readers to a specific device today, whether the iPad or the Kindle, could very well mean a dramatic loss of control for my business tomorrow.

Dennis Johnson is the founder of MobyLives, and the co-founder and co-publisher of Melville House.