"Lending" isn't one of the available operations for digital content, so there's no way to "enable lending." One can only make or destroy a copy.
The closest approximation of "lending" would be for the library to loan you a reader/player device when they loan you the digital materials. In this case you never receive a copy of the digital materials at all--they live inside the device you borrowed from the library, which remains at all times owned by the library. This approach deals fairly with all the ownership-vs-control (the library owns the device, so the library gets to control it) and software compatibility issues (the library pre-installs working software, and you agree not to change it) of DRM. This approach even takes a stab at the digital divide issues, though it probably won't make much of a dent until ebook readers are cheap and plentiful to the same degree as the PADD devices littering meeting room tables in Star Trek. There are some problems, though. People could hack the devices to spy on later patrons. The devices would have to omit abusable features like GPS, cameras, or microphones. They'd have to be disposed of a responsible manner when they reached the end of their service lives.
The second-closest approximation of "lending" would be for patrons to agree to destroy their copy (or more likely the key to an encrypted copy) after a particular date. Arguably it should be trivial to write open-source software that automates such agreements if there was a way to codify them (and that should be about as hard to do as the browser certificate verification in HTTPS). The problem is that software can be modified to not honor such agreements, so the DRM market is full of people competing to make software modifications as difficult as possible in practice using every technical trick the law doesn't disallow (check out bruiser (http://i.imgur.com/LN92O.png) to get an idea of what DRM marketing looks like). Should we play this game, and would anyone care if we did?
We could implement The IEEE P1817 Standard for Consumer-ownable Digital Personal Property (http://grouper.ieee.org/groups/1817/index.html), assuming they get anywhere near to publishing a standards document. To me, it looks like none of the interested groups would buy into it: there's no incentive for people who already own big centralized DRM systems to change, there's not enough in the system for publishers (in addition to making copies harder, publishers also want usage data that comes out of centralized DRM schemes) and there's too much risk for patrons (who get no new capabilities relative to stuff that isn't encumbered by DRM, but do get the risk of people being able to literally steal electronic copies of their documents instead of merely keeping copies of them without authorization). It might also depend on every device having Internet access to work. Still, if we have to implement any DRM scheme, this is by far the least offensive.
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: October 4th, 2011 08:29 pm (UTC)The closest approximation of "lending" would be for the library to loan you a reader/player device when they loan you the digital materials. In this case you never receive a copy of the digital materials at all--they live inside the device you borrowed from the library, which remains at all times owned by the library. This approach deals fairly with all the ownership-vs-control (the library owns the device, so the library gets to control it) and software compatibility issues (the library pre-installs working software, and you agree not to change it) of DRM. This approach even takes a stab at the digital divide issues, though it probably won't make much of a dent until ebook readers are cheap and plentiful to the same degree as the PADD devices littering meeting room tables in Star Trek. There are some problems, though. People could hack the devices to spy on later patrons. The devices would have to omit abusable features like GPS, cameras, or microphones. They'd have to be disposed of a responsible manner when they reached the end of their service lives.
The second-closest approximation of "lending" would be for patrons to agree to destroy their copy (or more likely the key to an encrypted copy) after a particular date. Arguably it should be trivial to write open-source software that automates such agreements if there was a way to codify them (and that should be about as hard to do as the browser certificate verification in HTTPS). The problem is that software can be modified to not honor such agreements, so the DRM market is full of people competing to make software modifications as difficult as possible in practice using every technical trick the law doesn't disallow (check out bruiser (http://i.imgur.com/LN92O.png) to get an idea of what DRM marketing looks like). Should we play this game, and would anyone care if we did?
We could implement The IEEE P1817 Standard for Consumer-ownable Digital Personal Property (http://grouper.ieee.org/groups/1817/index.html), assuming they get anywhere near to publishing a standards document. To me, it looks like none of the interested groups would buy into it: there's no incentive for people who already own big centralized DRM systems to change, there's not enough in the system for publishers (in addition to making copies harder, publishers also want usage data that comes out of centralized DRM schemes) and there's too much risk for patrons (who get no new capabilities relative to stuff that isn't encumbered by DRM, but do get the risk of people being able to literally steal electronic copies of their documents instead of merely keeping copies of them without authorization). It might also depend on every device having Internet access to work. Still, if we have to implement any DRM scheme, this is by far the least offensive.