2-03-2010
Issued by « Electronic
Frontier Foundation » a guide: « Digital Books and
Your Rights : A Checklist for Readers ».
After
several years of false starts, the universe of digital books seems at last
poised to expand dramatically. Readers should view this expansion with both
excitement and wariness. Excitement because digital books could revolutionize
reading, making more books more findable and more accessible to more people in
more ways than ever before. Wariness because the various entities that will
help make this digital book revolution possible may not always respect the
rights and expectations that readers, authors, booksellers and librarians have
built up, and defended, over generations of experience with physical books.
As new
digital book tools and services roll out, we need to be able to evaluate not
only the cool features they offer, but also whether they extend (or hamper) our
rights and expectations.
The
over-arching question: are digital
books as good or better than physical books at protecting you and your rights
as a reader? Also available as a PDF
Below we
offer a checklist that can help guide your inquiry, as well as an extended
explanation of why the answers to these questions matter. Not surprisingly,
some of the issues overlap. For example, Digital Rights Management, or
"DRM," matters not only because of the limits it places on users, but
because of its impact on innovation and competition. Yet by separating out the
various issues, we hope to spur a more rigorous consideration of the various
digital book offerings.
Our goal is
not to tell authors, publishers, vendors, libraries, or anyone else what
strategies they must adopt, or tell book purchasers what options they must
choose. We hope that a robust marketplace emerges, with various business models
and technologies. Instead, this checklist represents the key questions that
readers should ask of each new digital book product or service to evaluate
whether it adequately protects their interests. That sort of rigorous inquiry
will help us decide which digital book future we want — and how to vote with
our feet until we get it.
Sources :
http://www.tge-adonis.fr/?Guide-sur-les-droits-des-lecteurs by Elisabeth Caillon
https://www.eff.org/wp/digital-books-and-your-rights
Comments