DRM

Sarah Houghton-Jan (better known as the Librarian in Black) has published an interesting article in School Library Journal, with a practical and accessible discussion about digital rights management and libraries. It’s a big complex topic and she does a great job of boiling it down to… ‘what does this mean for us right now?’.

In Kansas, for example, we have the Kansas Audio Books, Music, and More project. OverDrive is the company that provides the resources for Kansas (and for many other libraries, too). Although it is possible to listen to the books and music on a computer, many people want to use this type of resource on their MP3 players. The iPod is an extremely popular MP3 player. Because of DRM, however, OverDrive content is not compatible with Apple players (without some clumsy and prohibitively time-consuming work-arounds). Have your iPod carrying patrons expressed frustration with this? Sarah’s article has some good ideas for responding to those concerns.

BBC News is carrying a story today on libraries in Britain that fear DRM (digital rights management) because it might make it harder or even impossiblee to access materials in their collection.

DRM figures into a few things that are happening in Kansas right now, such as the Overdrive audio book content project (and it’s why you can’t really put overdrive content on iPods), statewide databases, Atomic Learning, and anything related to e-books.

The article is worth reading, and we highly recommend it.

BBC NEWS | Technology | Libraries fear digital lockdown

Something to think about… if a patron checks out a CD from your library and it has harmful DRM on it, are you liable for any damages that might cause?

The Ann Arbor, Michigan, library system doesn’t seem to think so.

Vacuum - Edward Vielmetti in Ann Arbor, Michigan 48104: Sony rootkit music off the Ann Arbor District Library’s purchase list

If you’ve been following the Sony DRM rootkit debacle (like I have) the news has been so fast and furious that it’s hard to keep up. Here’s a concise timeline and quick summary of what’s happened so far.

The basich gist is: Revelations relating to Sony’s DRM systems, which show jaw-dropping contempt for their customers, for copyright law, for fair trading and for the public interest.

Sound like a juicy read? It is.

Boing Boing: Sony anti-customer technology roundup and time-line

Ha! Libraries made front page on CNN.com. This is a topic we’re going to cover at NEST so here’s a preview of a few of the things we’ll be talking about.

CNN.com - Libraries offering audiobook downloads - Aug 26, 2005

A quite interesting blog about the future and current usage of e-books, both hardware, software, content, and issues surrounding them. For those of you interested in e-books, this might be a very good resource for you.

Teleread.org Weblog