www/server/staging drm-in-schools-ebooks-when-l...

[Dora Scilipoti]

CVSROOT:        /web/www
Module name:    www
Changes by:     Dora Scilipoti <dora>   21/09/22 09:22:50

Modified files:
        server/staging : 
                         
drm-in-schools-ebooks-when-life-imitates-dystopian-literature.html 

Log message:
        Some editing after discussions with Barra.

CVSWeb URLs:
http://web.cvs.savannah.gnu.org/viewcvs/www/server/staging/drm-in-schools-ebooks-when-life-imitates-dystopian-literature.html?cvsroot=www&r1=1.1&r2=1.2

Patches:
Index: drm-in-schools-ebooks-when-life-imitates-dystopian-literature.html
===================================================================
RCS file: 
/web/www/www/server/staging/drm-in-schools-ebooks-when-life-imitates-dystopian-literature.html,v
retrieving revision 1.1
retrieving revision 1.2
diff -u -b -r1.1 -r1.2
--- drm-in-schools-ebooks-when-life-imitates-dystopian-literature.html  25 Jun 
2021 12:40:05 -0000      1.1
+++ drm-in-schools-ebooks-when-life-imitates-dystopian-literature.html  22 Sep 
2021 13:22:49 -0000      1.2
@@ -63,6 +63,22 @@
 
 <p>It is our <em>present</em>.</p>
 
+<h3>What is DRM?</h3>
+
+<p>DRM is an initialism which is supposed to stand for 
+&ldquo;Digital Rights Management,&rdquo; but in practice it's more accurate 
+to say it stands for &ldquo;Digital <em>Restrictions</em> Management.&rdquo; 
+It refers to any means used to control copyrighted and proprietary digital 
+works and hardware. Its purpose is to restrict what users can do. DRM is an 
+umbrella term for various tools aimed at achieving that goal, such as legal 
+agreements (which is the one I'm talking about in this article,) or malware 
+that seeks to prevent specific actions. For example, to prevent users from 
+connecting to a website through the TOR network or from outside of a certain 
+geographical area (Ireland, in my case.) For some examples of Digital 
+Restrictions Management, take a look at <a 
+href="/proprietary/proprietary-drm.html">
+https://www.gnu.org/proprietary/proprietary-drm.html</a>.</p>
+
 <h3>A Real-Life Encounter With Becoming Illegal</h3>
 
 <p>During the course of my secondary school education, I was contacted by a
@@ -77,59 +93,41 @@
 &ldquo;piracy.&rdquo;</p>
  
 <p>The terms and conditions <a href="#terms" id="terms-rev"><sup>[3]</sup></a> 
-of the dis-service are a little hard to find, which makes one feel the 
+of the dis-service are somewhat hard to find, which makes one feel the 
 publisher is untrustworthy. They are not readily available on the login page 
 or on the main library page; instead, they are hidden in the help section. 
 I won't quote them exactly, but they do expressly forbid the sharing of 
 passwords. They also contain several other things worth noting, which I will 
 discuss later.</p>
 
-<p>The terms and conditions are very, very clear about one thing. You're not
-allowed to share your ebook in any way, with any means, under any  
+<p>The terms and conditions are very, very clear about one thing: you're not
+allowed to share the ebook in any way, with any means, under any  
 circumstance.</p>
 
 <p>Let me clear up one thing. I don't actually own the ebook. The physical 
 book proudly displays a notice on the cover saying you'll get a free ebook 
 version along with your purchase. That's misleading, at best. What I get is 
 a time-limited license to access its contents, exclusively on the 
-publisher's proprietary service. I can't download it to get a local copy to 
+publisher's proprietary platform. I can't download it to get a local copy to 
 use offline because the publisher claims it's &ldquo;too big&rdquo; to fit 
-in removable media. <em>Yeah, right.</em> The publisher appears to be 
-stretching the truth.</p>
-
-<p>DRM is an initialism which is supposed to stand for 
-&ldquo;Digital Rights Management,&rdquo; but in practice it's more accurate 
-to say it stands for &ldquo;Digital <em>Restrictions</em> Management.&rdquo; 
-DRM refers to any means used to control copyrighted and proprietary digital 
-works and hardware. Its purpose is to restrict what users can do. DRM is an 
-umbrella term for various tools aimed at achieving that goal, such as legal 
-agreements (which is the one I'm talking about in this article,) or malware 
-that seeks to prevent specific actions; for example, to prevent users from 
-connecting to a website through the TOR network or from outside of a certain 
-geographical area (Ireland, in my case.) For some examples of Digital 
-Restrictions Management, take a look at <a 
-href="/proprietary/proprietary-drm.html">
-https://www.gnu.org/proprietary/proprietary-drm.html</a>.</p>
-
+in removable media, ignoring the fact that I may just want it on my hard 
+drive. I decided to see if the claim was true and found that the grand total
+size of the book came in orders of magnitude lower than even the capacity of 
+a CD-R disc. Are we really to believe the reason we can't download a copy of a
+book is that it can't fit in removable media? In my opinion, the real
+reason they don't want people to download copies is to prevent sharing.</p>
 
 <h3>Common Restrictions</h3>
 
-<p>You may be asking now: &ldquo;If you don't like it, why don't you refuse 
-to use it?&rdquo; See, the issue here is I have a choice. I have a choice 
-between agreeing to use this service, and all terms they impose on me with no 
-room for negotiation, or simply being unable to study and fail. And with the 
-current direction of education, it's looking as if physical books aren't 
-going to be much of an option, either.</p>
-
-<p>Some new schools where I live in Ireland are using iPads (which has a
+<p>Some new schools where I live in Ireland are using iPads (which have a
 whole host of <a href="/proprietary/malware-apple.html">privacy and ethical 
-concerns</a> in and of itself, with the goal of moving all their student's 
+concerns</a> in and of itself) with the goal of moving all their student's 
 books to these online services. Benefits cited often include reduced weight 
 in student's bags, ease of organization, and multimedia capabilities. All of 
-which are true, but what is often neglected is that the move to commonly 
-available digital devices requires students to agree to terms of service 
-required by outside companies. These terms restrict the learner's ability to 
-explore, research, <em>learn</em>.</p>
+which are true, but what is often neglected is that the move to digital 
+devices requires students to agree to terms of service imposed by outside 
+companies. These terms restrict the student's ability to explore, research, 
+<em>learn</em>.</p>
 
 <p>There are also a lot of practical downsides to ebooks on these platforms. 
 They have to be used with a constant connection to the Internet, which will 
@@ -145,49 +143,46 @@
 
 <p>When schools use physical books, students at least have the option of 
 buying them second-hand, or getting them handed down from a friend or a 
-sibling. There are more options than getting an ebook code from a single 
-centralized publisher. If this continues, we may see a publisher monopoly, 
+sibling. If the practice of getting an ebook access code from a single 
+centralized publisher continues, we may see a publisher monopoly  
 where textbooks needed for our free education are held away from us with a 
 massive price tag. We may end up with a situation like Texas Instruments, 
-where a company with a stranglehold on education can afford to charge 
-astronomical prices and have no need to innovate or upgrade, a position 
-gained through billing themselves as the educational standard to the 
-National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, and then once established as 
-such, it began to abuse their position by refusing to reduce the price of 
-their calculators as they become cheaper to manufacture, year after year, 
-leaving them with gross profit margins of up to 90 percent, all the while 
-making it very difficult for lower income families to educate their 
-children.</p>
+where a company with a stranglehold on education can charge astronomical 
+prices without the need to innovate or upgrade. Such a position was gained  
+by pushing themselves as the educational standard in the National Council of 
+Teachers of Mathematics. Once established as such, the company began to 
+abuse its position by refusing to reduce the price of their calculators as 
+they become cheaper to manufacture year after year. This leaves the company 
+with gross profit margins of up to 90 percent, all the while making it very 
+difficult for lower income families to educate their children.</p>
 
 <p>Students don't have much of a say about which platforms they'll be 
 required to use. The school may give them an email address, provided by 
-Microsoft Office 365, and require the student to agree to the terms imposed 
+Microsoft Office 365, and require them to agree to the terms imposed 
 by the publisher. Students may need books from different publishers, and may 
-have to agree to multiple services' contracts. And even if they do agree 
-now, that they find these terms acceptable and fair, most of these contracts 
-reserve the right to change the terms of that contract. Perhaps the 
-publisher might&mdash;as I discovered in the terms of the dis-service I 
-mentioned earlier&mdash;reserve the right to later charge fees to access 
-your books. Do the students really have a choice? Not at the moment, and 
-unless something changes, they don't get to consent. They're forced to 
-accept the terms, no matter what they think of them, or they lose their 
-chances for education by losing their books. No one can consent when the 
-ultimatum is losing their right to an education.</p>
+have to agree to multiple contracts. And even if they do agree to a given 
+version of a contract, most publishers reserve the right to change it. 
+Perhaps the publisher might&mdash;as I discovered in the terms of the 
+dis-service I mentioned earlier&mdash;reserve the right to later charge fees 
+to access the books. Do the students really have a choice? Not at the moment. 
+Unless something changes, they don't have a choice. They're forced to accept 
+the terms, no matter what they think of them, otherwise they lose their 
+chances for education by losing their books.</p>
 
 <h3>Challenging the Assumptions</h3>
 
 <p>Some may say that these terms are reasonable, that students aren't 
 entitled to learn how the tools that they use during their education work or 
-to sharebinformation with their peers.</p>
+to share information with their peers.</p>
 
-<p>Would you object to a student reading their schoolbooks while on holidays 
-in France? If they were to read it while traveling to Northern Ireland? On a 
-bus? In a public library?</p>
+<p>Would you object to a student reading her or his schoolbooks while on 
+holidays in France? If she or he read it while traveling to Northern 
+Ireland? On a bus? In a public library?</p>
 
 <p>Of course not.</p>
 
 <p>Would you also object to, say, a student lending a copy of a book for a 
-few minutes? Allowing someone sitting beside them to look at their book? Is 
+few minutes? Allowing someone sitting next to them to look at their book? Is 
 it theft if a student copies down a sentence from their textbook? Piracy? 
 Should the teacher report them for illegal activity?</p>
 
@@ -200,27 +195,43 @@
 
 <p>Of course not.</p>
 
-<p>And finally, would you object to a student selling their textbook to 
-another student when they no longer have a need of it? Giving their notes, 
-made using information from the book, to another student? That they 
-shouldn't be allowed to give away their book if it has a line crossed out 
-and rewritten?</p>
+<p>And finally, would you object to students selling their textbooks when 
+they no longer have a need for them? Giving away their notes, made using 
+information from the book, to other students? That they shouldn't be allowed 
+to give away their book if it has a line crossed out and rewritten?</p>
 
 <p>Of course not.</p>
 
 <p>My friend made quite an apt summary: <q>It's like [school systems] put 
 the rights of companies over the rights of the students.</q></p>
 
-<p>With the current landscape of education looking to the benefits of 
-technology, we need to be careful. Without proper consideration and action, 
-we may find ourselves in a reality even more like <cite>The Right to 
-Read</cite>. Education boards have already made mistakes like this in the 
-past, like with Texas Instruments. I would urge everyone to start pushing 
-against terms like these. You could petition your schools to consider the 
-terms and conditions of an ebook service in the decision process of which 
-textbook to use and make it a requirement that the ebook be DRM-free and 
-downloadable, for example. You could start a libre-licensed textbook for 
-your local cirriculum. Let's make sure schools don't punish learning.</p>
+<p>With the current landscape of educational institutions looking towards
+new technologies, we need to be careful. Without proper consideration and 
action, 
+we may find ourselves in a reality even more similar to the one described in
+<cite>The Right to Read</cite>. Education boards have already made mistakes 
+in the past, like with Texas Instruments. I would urge everyone to start 
+pushing against this sort of terms. Here are some suggestions:</p>
+
+<ul>
+<li>During the decision process about which textbook to use, you could 
+petition your school to consider the terms and conditions of an ebook 
+service and make it a requirement that the ebook be DRM-free and 
+downloadable.</li> 
+
+<li>You could start the preparation of a textbook for your local 
+cirriculum and publish it under a free license such as the <a 
+href="/licenses/licenses.html#FDL">GNU Free Documentation License</a>, 
+<a 
+href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/";>CC BY-SA</a>, or
+similar.</li>
+</ul>
+
+<p>Last but not least, support the FSF's
+<a 
+href="https://www.defectivebydesign.org/";>campaign</a> to abolish DRM.</p>
+
+<p>Let's make sure schools don't punish learning.</p>
+
 
 <div class="infobox">
 <hr />
@@ -305,7 +316,7 @@
 
 <p class="unprintable">Updated:
 <!-- timestamp start -->
-$Date: 2021/06/25 12:40:05 $
+$Date: 2021/09/22 13:22:49 $
 <!-- timestamp end -->
 </p>
 </div>