Grant libraries non-commercial access to copyrighted material on a defined time horizon. Content producers could add a Library License to the terms of their publishing contracts. via Library License. The big publishers would be unlikely to pick it up but it would give smaller, independent content owners an option for allowing libraries to use their [...]

Publishing Industry Forces OverDrive and Other Library eBook Vendors to Take a Giant Step Back | Librarian by Day. Bobbi L. Newman has collected the responses to the problem, which, in a nutshell, is that Harper Collins has decided that the ebooks in libraries will stop working after 26 downloads.

German publisher Springer Verlag decided not to infect the 40,000 ebook titles it sells to libraries with DRM — though the booksellers that carry Springer titles still insist on DRM for their proprietary stores. As a result, “once libraries have paid for the content, the e-books are available without charge to everyone at these institutions, [...]

We've all seen the studies trumpeting massive losses to the US economy from piracy. One famous figure, used literally for decades by rightsholders and the government, said that 750,000 jobs and up to $250 billion a year could be lost in the US economy thanks to IP infringement. A couple years ago, we thoroughly debunked [...]

In a significant step toward offering public library patrons DRM-free downloadable music, Library Ideas LLC, a new company that has previously hooked up libraries with Redbox video dispensers, has joined with Sony Music Entertainment to launch the Freegal Music Service, offering public library subscribers access to hundreds of thousands of songs in Sony’s catalog. Sony [...]

This document collects reported cases where the anti-circumvention provisions of the DMCA have been invoked not against pirates, but against consumers, scientists, and legitimate competitors. It will be updated from time to time as additional cases come to light. Previous versions remain available. via Unintended Consequences: Twelve Years under the DMCA | Electronic Frontier Foundation.

via The Brads – a comic about web design » The Brads – Why DRM Doesn’t Work. Why file-sharing is still so popular.

iPad in libraries – Unshelved Answers. A great discussion on the future of ebooks in libraries.

After Three Months, Only 35 Subscriptions for Newsday's Web Site In late October, Newsday, the Long Island daily that the Dolans bought for $650 million, put its web site, newsday.com, behind a pay wall. The paper was one of the first non-business newspapers to take the plunge by putting up a pay wall, so in [...]

It's been 18 months since O'Reilly, the world's largest publisher of tech books, stopped using DRM on its ebooks. In the intervening time, O'Reilly's ebook sales have increased by 104 percent. Now, when you talk about ebooks and DRM, there's always someone who'll say, “But what about [textbooks|technical books|RPG manuals]? Their target audience is so [...]