Mixed Signals
Any sufficiently advanced information is indistinguishable from noise
Tuesday 14 October 2008, 4:13 PM
No need to burn books you can't read - DRM and public libraries
I have just opened and defused an email positively crackling with anger, frustration and hurt. It was followed at speed with eight more, by way of illustration. Having read them all, I second every emotion.
My correspondent is a researcher, who regularly deals with academic papers and journals. They have great experience in this matter – indeed, have published much themselves – and use a wide variety of sources. They do not work for a commercial organisation: the work they do is for the public good.
One of the sources is – or was – the British Library Document Supply Services, who deliver scans of documents over email. These cost a lot of money (despite, in the case of academic journals, usually being produced with public money and the actual authors, as far as I'm aware, not seeing a penny) and are DRM'd to the hilt.
Until recently, these documents could be read in Adobe Reader 6 or 7. No longer. Adobe is withdrawing support from these, and so the BL is insisting that its customers move to Adobe Digital Editions. My researcher received a worrying email promising "Enhancements to our Encryption Software". You'll note how the BL see the delivery mechanism – it's an encryption channel first, an actual service to the user... well, let's see.
Among the great advantages that the BL promises from this 'enhancement' is "More robust document security". It's certainly secure against people who use Linux, as ADE only works on Windows or Mac.
My correspondent, although a Windows user, has never been unduly worried about document security. She takes care of that by making a few copies around the place using a USB key.
No more. To "greatly enhance your reading experience" by "adding the ability to transfer your documents to wherever you want to read them" and "preserving your valuable documents by backing them up on one computer and restoring them on another", the software says, "you must reactivate using your Microsoft Live ID or Adobe ID".
Not that this is in any way optional, even you don't want to greatly enhance your reading experience in this way, you need to create one of those IDs. Grinding their teeth, my correspondent went to open the document (thirty pages of an academic journal, costing around a pound a page) and was greeted by the Adobe DRM Activator. Which said "Welcome. Please tell us a little about yourself."
So they had to fill in name and email address – to "Discover the world of digital media!" -- and then cope with a long and entirely horrible automated email from Microsoft demanding, in tones of a bureaucratic robot, that they confirm their Live ID request – oh, and check out the Privacy Statement.
(All this is to read a document costing thirty pounds for thirty pages. Remember that.)
After all that? Epic fail. "This Digital Edition cannot be opened. You have tried to open a Digital Edition that was downloaded to another computer. You can open such a document on two computers only when you have activated Adobe Reader or Acrobat on BOTH computers using the SAME Microsoft .NET Passport or Adobe ID.
PROBLEM: This computer and the computer to which the document was downloaded were activated using different .NET Passports or Adobe IDs.
SOLUTION: Return to the retailer, library or other location where you acquired the document and obtain permission to open it on this computer."
As my correspondent says: "After all that I still couldn't open the document (which I've only opened once before) and got this. Now I know I haven't opened the document at another computer because this is my only computer with a printer - so I didn't open it anywhere else. I am never using this service again. The British Library, Microsoft and Adobe can go shove their DRM up their document delivery service exit. "
This, let me reiterate, is a public body providing publicly paid-for research to a highly-qualified professional engaged in impeccable work for the public service.
It is hard to imagine something more expensive, condescending, inaccurate, frustrating and enraging – nor something better calculated to restrict knowledge and broadcast ignorance.
It's almost as if the parties involved actively want to prevent people learning. It certainly feels that way.
British Library, are you listening?
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PreviousComments on this post
That was alarming to read! What's the way out here? Is it to start again with open office and its save to PDF option?
I thought microsoft would have learnt by now. But as they seem to be part of a process that is involved with withholding knowledge maybe that inhibits their ability to see clearly, as if they are dinosours in a fog, bumping and crashing in to everything.
The whole issue of knowledge being restricted makes my blood boil. I think people should be encouraged to learn more. At the moment it seems as if the mass population is still being led into a pit of mass consumerism, and it helps if people don't know diddly s**t!!
I have a comment due back from the British Library, which noted the blog post and are keen to respond just as soon as it gets hold of the right itinerant executive.
I'm aware I'm conflating a number of issues here, but the message is simple: this stuff is actually hurting. My correspondent said that they suspect they got a couple of things wrong in trying to get to their document: it is in the nature of DRM to assume that all mistakes are hostile, and that really puts the glace cherry of ire on the cake of misery. I hope something of this anger comes through.
It is in the nature of people such as my correspondent, who lives for the joy of finding things out and showing people why these things matter, to be impatient with anything that gets in the way. And it is a poisonous irony that IT, which should be making the life of knowledge workers easier, simpler and more effective, is instead channelling frustration into their souls. Bureaucracy is infectious, and it has jumped the species barrier.
Here Here!! I don't think the bureaucracy wants to begin a pattern of messing with our librarians (a truly great and noble vocation in the corridors of time). So, just one slip and it's frustration city. I'm sure the pushers of this kind of DRM must know what they are doing, and they must stop it immediately!
Is it just me, or is there faintly Orwellian whiff to Microsoft/Adobe trying to "greatly enhance your reading experience"? The frustration of the end user in this case is palpable to the extent that I was getting annoyed just reading about it!
It strikes me that a community driven effort to provide an alternative open format repository for academic works (assuming such does not already exist) would be a timely idea. Can it really be so difficult for a handful of institutions to come together and pool their resources to this end?
It'll be interesting to hear what defence the Library might have to offer against this automated blithe hostility towards the end user.
There are lots of community-driven efforts to provide open access to academic work, and many of them are effective and progressing well. That argument has been won.
And that's why my correspondent - and myself - find it so unutterably frustrating when things take a giant lurch backward. Not only was this a terrible experience, it had the gall to represent itself as an 'enhancement', when the only thing being enhanced was the idea that large organisations should pay each other large sums of money in further calcifying an already fossilied business model. I think above all, it's that sense of condescension - talked to by a large and unlovely marketing machine as if we were slightly stupid children - which makes the whole experience more poisonous than the normal bureaucratic sludge.
People who use the BL are intelligent, analytical and adult. Don't be dissing us. We know what's going on. At least be honest.
I've already ranted on about JSTOR, which remains the world's largest tantalus for information workers - and I'm sad to say that in the year since I did so, nothing's changed there either.
For every complaint that Wikipedia is dumbing down the world or Google clogging the synapses, I want to see ten complaints that the real deal is being deliberately and consistently withheld from us. Get to it!
Got a reply from the British Library - here reprinted in full (isn't it amazing what you can do with electronic data these days?)
--------
Dear Rupert
[...]
I was disappointed to read of the frustration felt by your correspondent and wanted to address a number of the points raised in your post.
Encryption - our electronic document delivery service is something we have developed in response to our customers' need to receive documents more quickly. However, the existing copyright regulations around sharing such documents apply and, since documents are much easier to share in a digital environment, we are obliged to apply quite complex software that restricts this sharing. The electronic service is only there as a means of getting the document to the user more quickly and we encourage all of our customers to print out the document as soon as they receive it.
Adobe ID - this is a service that Adobe offer to customers who would like to access their documents from more than one PC. In order to comply with copyright legislation some security measures need to be enabled that identify the customer as the purchaser of the article. The customer is not obliged to register for this process and can decline the Adobe ID registration offer and download documents to their PC and access them for three years without having to register.
A full set of FAQs can be found at http://www.bl.uk/reshelp/atyourdesk/docsupply/productsservices/sed/sedfaq/index.html#13ImhavingtroubleinstallingADEWhocanhelp but if your correspondent continues to have problems, I'd urge her to contact our Customer Services team on +44 (0)1937 546060
Price - your correspondent seems to have chosen to purchase her document as a commercial entity, which means that the price she has paid for her document consists firstly of a copyright fee, which is determined by the publisher of the article and paid to them in full - usually between £5 and £30, and, secondly, a service charge that covers the cost of us delivering the document (the standard charge is currently £7.85).
However, the British Library also offers an alternative model for non-commercial researchers that provides an exemption for the full copyright fee and a significant discount on our service charge. This will result in the non-commercial user paying £4.95 for all articles in our collection. As a matter of fact, the Library makes no profit from delivering documents to non-commercial researchers. Indeed, we choose to underwrite part of the cost as a service to the UK research community.
Barry Smith [Head of Priced Services]
-----------------
To which I replied:
Thanks for your reply. I do understand that you are constrained in what you can do – and what you have to do – but you are the contact point for your users.
Your answer doesn’t really touch on my correspondent’s major points, which is that the whole process is painfully designed, error-prone and pointless (you can, after all, scan the printed document straight back in if you _want_ to commit the hideous crimes against which this massive bulwark has been erected).
What, exactly, is the encryption service designed to thwart? Is it really worth that, given that it efficiently stops many of the legitimate uses users would want to make of electronic documents? Doesn’t the fact that you have to recommend that the user print out the document strike you as a remarkable state of affairs? Did you have any say in the details of the distribution system, or is it mandated by your suppliers?
As for the cost – I’m sure you don’t make any money at it, and that you underwrite some of those costs. How much of that goes into running the encryption service? I know something of the mechanics of running online services, and extra layers of complexity rarely come cheap. It seems to me you’re in a unenviable position of being a tax farmer, funnelling revenue back to the software vendors for absolutely no benefit to yourself, the users (or, indeed, the originators of the material). The only benefit in exchange for this money and complexity is that you are allowed to do your job. Is this an unfair perspective?
Why is there no support for Linux?
If you could provide documents more cheaply, with fewer restrictions and less complexity, to more people, would you choose to do so?
And finally (I could go on at great length, but it’s Friday!) – the salt in the wound was the selling of the service as an ‘enhancement’. If you are forced to maintain someone else’s business model (no, no I won’t go on), why do you have to pretend that it’s anything other than it is?
The light went on for me about the potential of universal electronic data distribution in the early 1980s, and I’ve been an evangelist for the cultural and social implications ever since. That things like this are going on nearly thirty years later are a source of considerable distress and frustration to me, especially when one thinks how it could (and, I’m sure, will) be.
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I am not surprised at all to learn about Rupert's experience with the British Library. The BL seems to have a long history of favoring proprietory technologies over open-source alternatives, often excluding Linux users. In a government funded digitisation project a few years ago we developed a GPL-licenced open-source tool for a web based and MySQL-driven issue tracker, and the BL approached us on this with interest. When they learnt that this tool has to run on a web server that requires PHP they ran away. They only knew about the Microsoft IIS Server technology. They were neither able to install and run the PHP on an open-source Apache server, nor were they willing or able to run the PHP script on IIS.
Open standards and the GPL are there for a good reason, and this Microsoft and Adobe sponsored DRM seems to go against it, at the tax payer's expense.
"Print it out when you receive it?!!!"...what kind of idiotic, typically unthinking bureaucratic response it that? Talk about DOUBLING environmental impact! I print as little as possible. Digital on a screen is enough for me, thank you. And saving the file on the computer that I take everywhere with me! :-)
http://www.canadacomputers.com/index.php?do=ShowProduct&cmd=pd&pid=018911&cid=896.862
As a public high school teacher, I'm appalled that librarians are suggesting that everything be "printed when you receive it"!!?! Outrageous environmental crime, as far as I'm concerned.
Who needs firemen? Ray Bradbury's dark vision won't require flame or smoke to come true, just the misapplication of idiotic software by idiots.
I have no idea why the British Library thinks it has to protect the copyright of an author when the work is being used as in a "fair-use". They've converted themselves from librarian to another public employee, "thought-policeman". George Orwell's 1984 is just a few years late. So sad.
