Buy once, use however

When I buy a piece of media, whether it’s a book or movie or piece of music, I’d like to be able to enjoy it wherever I want on whatever device I want, without having to rebuy it. It’s already accepted that once you buy a CD you can rip it to your iPod. Ripping movies to your iPod is getting there. What about books? What about software?

In the prior two examples it’s easy for the buyer to transcode. It’s automated. It takes hard work to turn a book into an ebook, so I can understand why companies like O’Reilly charge extra for a book that comes with an ebook; but what if the community were to make the ebooks for free? What if developers would port software for free?

I’d like to talk about my old days on irc.bookwarez.org. It hosted a public channel where people traded in versioned text, HTML, LIT, and any number of formats of ebooks that they painstakingly scanned, OCRed and proofread. In many cases they also annotated. The downside to this arrangement is that it could result in lost sales.

What if O’Reilly gave you a free copy of a community contributed ebook with purchase of ebook, or let you buy a bundle with a professionally created copy? Amazon could give you a choice of a book bundle with a community made ebook at no extra charge, or a Kindle copy at a modest surcharge.

Software is a trickier issue. People are again willing to make free versions of games that use official resources for platforms that aren’t officially supported as we see with Freeciv and Frets on Fire but these are reinventions of the wheel rather than tweaked copies. Closed source ports are near impossible to make and the producers these days are unlikely to let their source out.

Projects like Freeciv skirt the same thin line that game console emulators do: the creators of the original don’t like them, but there isn’t much to do if they don’t copy anything. Except when Sony bankrupted the creators of Bleem! under legal costs. Producers of resource-compatable clones seem to be safe as long as they don’t sell their work.

The issue with software has been mostly solved. The community can release clones with little fear. The problem remains with works that have to be copies, not remakes, and are difficult to translate from one format to another. Right now the best example is books. Creative Commons is both libre and gratis. I know that the makers of some of my favourite works will never publish gratis. As a middle ground what I want to see is a scheme that’s libre but not gratis so I can buy something once and enjoy it however I like.

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