Let’s be clear: if your property can be altered, recalled, or reclaimed by the seller without your permission and knowledge you never really owned that property. Home foreclosure and car repossession are other examples that come to mind. The CBC article is right to refer to it as the Amazon Kindle Service – a service may be discontinued at any time.

George Orwell would indeed smile to see Amazon fulfilling his vision of the future – along with such better known examples as MS Windows (Genuine Advantage program and the .NET framework assistant) and locked cell phones.

Yes, there are probably legitimate copyright issues here – but this is no way to run an eBusiness. Bad Amazon… bad, bad!

-pmh

Update:

1. This MSNBC article on the Amazon 1984 scandal has a more humorous (sarcastic?) tone.
2. This Fictionmatters article provides balanced and deeper coverage of the underlying issues. (…but I still say “Bad, Amazon… bad, bad!”)
3. Microsoft has apparently updated its .NET Framework Assistant to allow you to uninstall it from Firefox without the need to edit the Windows registry, locate remove system files, etc.

Update 2, The Apology:

Here’s word on Amazon’s apology but note that “…the apology failed to state that Amazon would not do the same thing again in similar circumstances…”

Yes We Scan - Carl Malamud

The other day The Portable Consultant caught this interview with Carl Malamud on an IT Conversations podcast. Having enjoyed his 1992 book Exploring the Internet: A Technical Travelogue, I was interested to hear that he is still pursuing his attempts to free public information from the reluctant hands of bureaucrats. In Exploring the Internet, he discussed his attempts to get the International Standards Organization to distribute international standards over the nascent Internet. Now he’s running for the position of Public Printer of the United States, a public office for which only one other person has bothered to run since it’s inception under President Lincoln.

Yesterday I attempted to print some Canadian tax changes, from a recent budget, that might affect my taxes next year. They are found on an ordinary web page almost entirely made up of text.

Adobe’s Acrobat 9 Pro Extended failed to print the page in my Firefox browser and issued the following error:

%%[Page: 14]%%%%[ Error: LucidaSans,Bold cannot be embedded because of licensing restrictions. ]%%
%%[ Font vendor (B&H) does not permit this font to be embedded in PDF. ]%%
...
[Warning] The font LucidaSans-Demi could not be embedded because of licensing restrictions.
Text may display incorrectly on platforms that do not have this font installed.
...
%%[ Flushing: rest of job (to end-of-file) will be ignored ]%%
%%[ Warning: PostScript error. No PDF file produced. ] %%

Now, I like to keep such documents in PDF rather than cutting and pasting into text files so I turned next to the freeware printing utility CutePDF and found it had no problem. It printed the web page as a PDF file just as I had asked Adobe to do… only CutePDF had no compunctions about embedded fonts being licensed to my machine. CutePDF uses the open source Ghostscript PostScript to PDF converter.

This is why open systems will win out every time against the forces of DRM. When DRM tries to stop us from legally accessing and ‘owing’ a copy of public documents it fails to meet the criteria of a reasonable and fair constraint on the use of intellectual property, in this case a font.

Carl Malamud understands the necessity for free and unrestricted access to public information – documents and databases. He understands the underlying technologies. This is why Cory Doctorow, Lawrence Lessig, Tim Bray and others who share these views are supporting his candidacy for the position of Public Printer of the United States via the Yes We Scan campaign.

For what its worth, I do too.

In fact, there are some governments on this side of the border who should also be paying attention to his candidacy and his platform for the fair dissemination of public documents and data.

Adobe… shame on you!

Cheers,
-pmh

(It’s sad that this business show is relegated to the ridiculously early time slot of 5:45 AM in Canada’s centre of business, Toronto. As well, it’s ridiculous that the content of this show is not available via RSS as a podcast/netcast that could be accessed at a reasonable hour given that there are now dozens of other shows available in that format! …but I digress.)

It was telling that the whole second half of the minister’s time was on the issue of copyright legislation. Secondly, it was somewhat odd that he chose the example of a software program rather than anything related to the real issue of digital rights management versus fair use in the area of consumer entertainment media such as music CDs or movie DVDs.

Did you catch that? He said Canada needs “cutting edge” copyright legislation and gave computer software as an example, not DRM. Now I could just assume he’s been burned by Michael Geist’s ongoing Facebook campaign against the Conservative government’s proposed legislation. Or I could sarcastically suggest he hasn’t been listening very well to the lobbyists who have been pounding at him to align Canada’s legislation with the United State’s Digital Copyright Millennium Act (DMCA) rather than taking a more reasoned approach such as jurisdictions such as the European Community…
…or… or… I could make the paranoid suggestion that someone has been talking to the Minister about how Free/Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS) is threatening software companies who follow the proprietary software model… and he’s become a bit confused about the two issues.

So, which is it?

• Avoidance of the issues? – expected of politicians.

• Confusion of digital media versus software programs? – expected of politicians renowned for their lack of technical understanding.

• A whiff of anti-open source lobbying going on in the wings? – ok, so that’s a paranoid thought… but… but… entirely plausible.

Since the Minister gave fully half of his interview time to this issue it would be very interesting to know, but unfortunately none of them reflects very well on the Minister’s approach, his knowledge, or the drivers behind his legislative agenda.

The host of Business Network, David Gray, did not delve into the Minister’s position at all… in fact, he only served as a platform for the Minister’s bland statements. He let the Minister off far too lightly, even for a business reporter. Hopefully, other CBC reporters will take up the slack. In any case, Canadians can inform themselves at Michaels Geist’s excellent blog post: Ten Questions for Industry Minister Jim Prentice.

Happy New Year!
-pmh