Jonathan Zittrain: 'Digital books are under the control of distributors rather than readers' (Wired UK)
abernard102@gmail.com 2013-07-09
Summary:
Consider what happened this past September, when Atlantic contributor Maria Konnikova discovered that Jonah Lehrer's partially fabricated book Imagine had disappeared. Search results disappeared from Amazon, the publisher no longer offered electronic versions and unsold print copies were removed from bookstores. Alone, a publisher's decision to withdraw a flawed book isn't a threat to speech. But it highlights a technological capability -- Poof! A book disappears -- that could be. Anyone with claims of copyright infringement, defamation, plagiarism or obscenity now has a powerful new tool to compel the full or partial retraction or alteration of a book. Even the mere threat of a lawsuit could pressure authors to digitally alter or retract what they've written. Purchasing and downloading a book on to your e-reader won't necessarily protect it from disappearing. In 2009, Amazon realised that copies of 1984 that had been sold through the Kindle platform at 99 cents each turned out to be still under copyright rather than, as the independent ebook publisher had thought, in the public domain. Amazon panicked and deleted the famed book about information control from the Kindle of each person who had obtained it. A minor furore ensured and Amazon apologised, promising not to act in such a way again. But the path is now clear for others to insist that Amazon does exactly what it did with1984. Digital books and music are often different from their physical counterparts in that consumers buy licences to a work, revocable under an ongoing contract, rather than their own copies. But the problem is not exclusive to these versions -- rather, any device that is tethered to the cloud could have its contents changed at the request of a publisher, author or angry subject. To meet these challenges, libraries should be given an opportunity to escrow copies of publicly available but still all-too-controllable texts. They can compare their own banked copies with what's currently on offer to the public, looking for changes to the integrity of texts. And, once purchased, readers themselves ought to be able to back up and lend their texts, just as with regular books. That way, those who want to censor will have to resort once again to the torch. If we're going to alter or destroy our past, we should have to see, hear and smell the paper burning."