Innovation according to Orange or how cautionary tales come true

-- By AliceAudreyRiviere - 27 Oct 2011

In 1997 Richard Stallman published a short novel called "The Right to Read", on an imaginary near future where Digital Rights Management (DRM) has gone so far that the sharing of digitalized books is a crime punished by imprisonment. Indeed, in this cautionary tale digitalized books are only to be read by the owner of the computer who purchased a personal right to read it, so that the mere reading of books by unauthorized persons is illegal. The whole process is controlled by an agency, The Software Protection Authority, with the help of a "copyright monitor" inserted in each book reporting "when and where it was read, and by whom, to Central Licensing" .

In the light of what Christine Albanel, France's former Minister for Culture and Communication turned Executive Vice President for Communication, Philanthropy, Content and Strategy of the France Telecom Orange Group, announced two weeks ago, this cautionary tale appears to have been indeed a visionary prediction. On October, 9th, on the French radio station France Culture, Ms. Albanel talked about Orange's latest project: an e-book called Read & Go. The process that Orange wants to set up is, in some respects, completely new in France. When using "traditional" digitalized books, the buyer downloads a book-length publication in digital form consisting of text and or images and thus acquires the right to access the document, to copy it, to reproduce it, provided it's for personal use. With the Read & Go, however, Orange suggests to sell, as a "trustful third person", a personal "right to read" which the company intends to "manage" .

In terms of results and from a technological point of view, this system is not different from other access control technologies used to limit the use and the sharing of digitalized books. As a matter of fact, almost every publisher commercializing e-books, regardless of the format used, has limited, to different degrees, the access to their content with the help of either DRM systems or digital watermarking processes . Thus, while many e-books are indeed limited to a certain number of reading devices , some e-publishers use more stringent e-book DRM schemes limiting at some point the opening of an e-book only to the computer with which it was downloaded .

Thus, no matter what technology is used, the result is the same: the use of digitalized books is controlled by security systems. From a legal point of view, however, the structure of this new e-book is different from what has been done before in the sense that it gives rise to a whole different conception of use and ownership.

First of all, it must be emphasized that, as law stands in France, there is no such "right to read" for, as Guillaume Champeau, journalist at the French magazine Numerama, rightly points out, "the law forbids the copy of a book, its adaptation, its recitation but never its reading" . Hence, it's questionable how licenses granting a digitalized right to read are going to be drafted in order to respect the constitutional imperative of article 13 of the Preamble of the Constitution of the 4th Republic , effectively consecrating the equal access for culture to every citizen. Due to the absence of decisions on this issue, which has not been dealt with by any French jurisdictions yet, no answer can be given to that question for the time being.

The philosophy behind the fact of acquiring a right to read an e-book is different from acquiring a license to read a book: it confers fewer rights on purchasers and impose more constraints upon them: what about Orange deciding to resort to face recognition processes on their e-books to effectively enforce their strategy? It's fine for the moment since we still do have the choice whether or not to resort to e-books, but what about the day where no paper books will be edited anymore? In this respect, Orange's latest project seems to be nothing more than the creation of an illegitimate monopole on technologies permitting access to education and culture. Similar monopoles have been created on other materials (music and movies) by the French DADVSI law, the initiator of which was precisely Ms. Albanel. But things are doubly different here: first of all, Ms. Albanel isn't Minister for Culture anymore, but works for a private company, so that the monopole she wants to establish is even less legitimate. Secondly, reading, as French philosopher Alain Finkelkraut said, is not just an "act of cultural consumption", but also the backbone of our whole western culture; "reading is a conversation".

But there's no reality in this essay.

There's no way for DRM'd reading schemes to succeed in even the medium-run, let alone the long run. The problem is that all text is eventually displayed where people quaintly known as "readers" can see it. And we all possess text recording devices of perfect sufficiency, called cameras. To turn a DRM'd e-book into an open text by cracking the encryption is usually easy. And once the encryption on one book has been cracked, the remainder of the thief's inventory is also cracked, and can be read and shared by honest readers everywhere. (Hence the intercontinental joke that is Mobipocket, the last time "la Francophonie" came up with a brain-dead "we control all our readers here, because they use the world's most intelligent language and are the dumbest possible people so we pwn them" bullshit.) But if the encryption resists cracking, every DRM'd ebook can be opened by photographing each page as it is displayed, and then turning those scans back into e-text. This is more laborious than cracking the encryption on the entire library, but as it only needs to be done once per book, rather than once per reader, it's sufficient to ensure the failure of the scheme.

This is not seriously disputed information: everybody knows it including the thieves and liars promoting these outrageous power grabs. An essay taking seriously their ridiculous posturing is worse then useless, because it gives the reader the very sense of helplessness in the face of remorseless power that thuggery wants to create.

The important issue isn't the possibility of success, which is zero, but the unique political conditions that result in repeated efforts to pretend to do this in France. There isn't anywhere else is the supposedly civilized world where this particular form of the nonsense goes on. You give one hint in the essay of the reason for this, but you don't follow it up. You should: that's where your essay actually is.

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