My latest Publishers Weekly column is “A Whip to Beat Us With,” which describes how publishers who allow retailers to add DRM to their products hand those retailers a commercial advantage to exercise over the publishers themselves.

Jim C. Hines’s e-books are marketed both through a big publisher and solo. The books that were re-priced by Amazon were his solo titles—unagented, and unrepresented by a major publisher. As an individual, Jim has no leverage over Amazon. Not so his publisher, Macmillan,[NB: Macmillan is NOT Jim’s publisher; this error was introduced during the editorial process and will be fixed ASAP] which controls a much larger number of SKUs and has much more leverage. Macmillan made headlines during its tense standoff with Amazon in 2011 over e-book pricing, but the publisher was able to sway Amazon because it could make a credible threat that it might get up from the negotiating table and take all its books, too—and others might follow.

But Macmillan’s edge—its scale—is also its undoing. Every day, Macmillan sells more e-books that have been locked into Amazon’s format. The millions of dollars that Amazon customers spend on Macmillan’s DRM-locked e-books represent millions of dollars of e-books Macmillan customers lose if they wanted to follow Macmillan away from Amazon. Publishers believe DRM protects their books. But DRM has created a world where publishers who walk away from negotiations with a DRM vendor like Amazon leave their customers behind.

Not just Macmillan. Any publisher that sees a substantial portion of its income from DRM vendors becomes little more than a commodity supplier to those vendors. If Hachette or HarperCollins decided to bite the bullet and pull their titles from Amazon during a dispute, how many of their authors would stay with them, knowing that the world’s largest bookseller and most popular e-book platform no longer carried their titles?

To appreciate this vulnerability, just look at what happened in February with the Independent Publishers Group, a distributor that asked Amazon to hold the line on its discount. They weren’t able to reach an agreement, and Amazon removed all IPG’s e-books from the Kindle store. The day that happened, IPG sent out a communique describing the situation and asking its readers to avoid the Kindle store in future.

A Whip to Beat Us With

US senators are calling for action on employers’ habit of demanding employees’ Facebook passwords, but no one seems to notice that many companies configure their computers so that they can eavesdrop on your Facebook, bank, and webmail passwords, even when those passwords are “protected” by SSL. In my latest Guardian column, “Protecting your Facebook privacy at work isn’t just about passwords,” I talk about how our belief that property rights — your employer’s right to control the software load on the computer they bought for your use — have come to trump privacy, human rights and basic decency.

Firms have legitimate (ish) reasons to install these certificates. Many firms treat the names of the machines on their internal networks as proprietary information (eg accounting.sydney.australia.company.com), but still want to use certificates to protect their users’ connections to those machines. So rather than paying for certificates from one of the hundreds of certificate authorities trusted by default in our browsers – which would entail disclosing their servers’ names – they use self-signed certificates to protect those connections.

But the presence of your employer’s self-signed certificate in your computers’ list of trusted certs means that your employer can (nearly) undetectably impersonate all the computers on the internet, tricking your browser into thinking that it has a secure connection to your bank, Facebook, or Gmail, all the while eavesdropping on your connection.

Many big firms use “lawful interception” appliances that monitor all employee communications, including logins to banks, health providers, family members, and other personal sites.

Protecting your Facebook privacy at work isn’t just about passwords

My latest Guardian column, “Copyright isn’t dead just because we’re not willing to let it regulate us,” makes the case that copyright hasn’t been killed by the Internet — it hasn’t even been threatened. Rather, the entertainment industry have made a nonsense of copyright by stubbornly (and ahistorically) insisting that this it concerns itself with controlling copying, instead of regulating competition and fairness in the entertainment industry’s supply chain. The Internet has made copying a routine part of every private person’s daily routine, and by insisting that all copying is in scope of the industrial regulation, the entertainment companies have appointed themselves the ultimate regulator of our whole Internet-enabled lives, and then declared copyright to be in terminal danger because no one was interested in giving over that control.

The internet era is not – and should not be – silent on the question: “How do we ensure that creators and investors get a chance at money?” That’s all copyright ever really wanted an answer to.

The inability of copyright to regulate cultural activity isn’t anything new. It’s probably true that this inability reduces the profitability of some entities in the entertainment industry’s supply chain, just as it increases others’. But that’s just a question of profit maximisation, not survival.

The problem is that the entertainment companies treated the increased ease of copying in the age of the internet as a signal that copyright should be expanded to cover more people and more activities, far outside of the entertainment industry. What they should have done is picked a new proxy for “this is an industrial activity within copyright’s scope” and soldiered on regulating themselves, without trying to regulate the whole world at the same time.

It’s time to stop declaring copyright dead because we aren’t willing to let it be the ultimate regulator of everything we do with a computer.

Copyright isn’t dead just because we’re not willing to let it regulate us