My latest Guardian column, “The BBC’s digital rights plans will wreak havoc on open source software,” describes how the BBC’s plan to add DRM to its high-def broadcasts will exclude free/open source software from use in digital television applications, slowing down innovation, raising costs, and harming the public interest. The BBC’s regulator, Ofcom, will soon hold a second consultation on the Beeb’s plan to add DRM to high-def broadcasts, and I’m urging them to get the BBC to answer for this consequence of the DRM plan.

The entire DTLA system relies on the keys necessary to authenticate devices and unscramble video being kept secret, and on the rules governing the use of keys being inviolable. To that end, the DTLA “Compliance and Robustness Agreement” (presented as “Annex C” to the DTLA agreement) has a number of requirements aimed at ensuring that every DTLA-approved device is armoured against user modification. Keys must be hidden. Steps must be taken to ensure that the code running on the device isn’t modified. Failure to take adequate protection against user modification will result in DTLA approval being withheld or revoked.

This is where the conflict with free/open source software arises.

Free/open source software, such as the GNU/Linux operating system that runs many set-top boxes, is created cooperatively among many programmers (thousands, in some cases). Unlike proprietary software, such as the Windows operating system or the iPhone’s operating system, free software authors publish their code and allow any other programmer to examine it, make improvements to it, and publish those improvements. This has proven to be a powerful means of quickly building profitable new businesses and devices, from the TomTomGo GPSes to Google’s Android phones to the Humax Freeview box you can buy tonight at Argos for around £130.

Because it can be adapted by anyone, free software is an incredible source of innovative new ideas. Because it can be used without charge, it has allowed unparalleled competition, dramatically lowering the cost of entering electronics markets. In short, free software is good for business, it’s good for the public, it’s good for progress, and it’s good for competition.

But free software is bad for DTLA compliance.

The BBC’s digital rights plans will wreak havoc on open source software

(Image: JERKS!, a Creative Commons Attribution photo from ebmorse’s photostream)

JC Hutchins — he of the boundless energy! — has assembled a free “holiday sampler” of excerpts from great new books, handily bundled together in a handsome PDF, well suited to loading onto your device or printing out for your Xmas holiday. In it are excerpts from recent books by some of my favorite authors, including Cherie Priest, Seth Godin, and Scott Sigler (as well as an excerpt from my latest novel, Makers.

In The Nick of Time holiday sampler (PDF)

JC’s page on the project with full contents and links

(Thanks, JC!

Well, it’s certainly a learning-experience kind of day.

Long story short: HarperCollins has shipped a beautiful, limited edition slipcased and signed edition of LITTLE BROTHER. But there are some problems:

1. Their ecommerce system is messed up and you have to phone in to order your copies

2. Due to a silly territorial rights issue, they won’t ship to the US or Canada

But don’t despair! A fantastic British online bookseller called The Book Depository:

1. Can sell the limited edition

2. Is charging *less* than HarperCollins for it

3. Doesn’t charge for shipping

4. Ships to the US, Canada and 40+ other countries

5. Processes payment in your local currency, saving you currency conversion fees

Sorry to be learning in public here, but I’m pretty happy that this worked out the way it did!

Little Brother Limited Edition on The Book Depository

HarperCollins have just brought out a beautiful limited deluxe edition of my novel Little Brother. It’s a slipcased hardcover, in a limited run of 500 signed copies, and it sports eight spectacular original illustrations by Richard Wilkinson (along with some really snazzy endpapers: a map of San Francisco’s Mission district redrawn as a circuit-diagram). All the art is Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike licensed, too, and ready for your fan Little Brother remixes.

Now the bad news: it’s only available outside of the US and Canada, due to a really silly bit of lawyerly risk-aversion about territorial rights. I’m working on seeing if there’s a way to arrange to do a grey-market export to US/Canada, and earmarking, say, 100 of them for this purpose, but I can’t make any guarantees.

But the good news for Britons is that HarperCollins will guarantee delivery before Xmas if you buy before Friday! Get ’em while they last!

Update: OK, the payment processor here is SERIOUSLY b0rked. You can order copies by phone here: +44 (0)870 787 1724

Little Brother – Cory Doctorow
Limited Edition Deluxe Version

High rez, Creative Commons licensed art by Richard Wilkinson

Jade Colbert transcribed my speech from the Canadian National Reading Summit, entitled “How to Destroy the Book.” She did a great job!

There is a group of powerful anti-copyright activists out there who are trying to destroy the book. These pirates would destroy copyright, and they have no respect for our property. They dress up their thievery in high-minded rhetoric about how they are the true defenders and inheritors of creativity, and they have sold this claim around the world to regulators and lawmakers alike. There are members of Parliament and Congress-people who are unduly influenced by them. They say they’re only trying to preserve the way it’s always been. They claim that their radical agenda is somehow conservative. But what they really see is a future in which the electronic culture market grows by leaps and bounds and they get to be at the centre of it. They claim that this is about ethics, but anyone who thinks about it for a minute can see that it’s about profit.

We are the people of the book. We love our books. We fill our houses with books. We treasure books we inherit from our parents, and we cherish the idea of passing those books on to our children. Indeed, how many of us started reading with a beloved book that belonged to one of our parents? We force worthy books on our friends, and we insist that they read them. We even feel a weird kinship for the people we see on buses or airplanes reading our books, the books that we claim. If anyone tries to take away our books—some oppressive government, some censor gone off the rails—we would defend them with everything that we have. We know our tribespeople when we visit their homes because every wall is lined with books. There are teetering piles of books beside the bed and on the floor; there are masses of swollen paperbacks in the bathroom. Our books are us. They are our outboard memory banks and they contain the moral, intellectual, and imaginative influences that make us the people we are today.

Copyright recognizes this. It says that when you buy a book, you own the book. It’s yours to give away, yours to keep, yours to license or to borrow, to inherit or to be included in your safe for your children. For centuries, copyright has acknowledged that sacred connection between readers and their books. We think of copyright as something that regulates things within a bunch of buckets—DVDs, video games, records—but books are more than all of these things. Books are older than copyright. Books are older than publishing. Books are older than printing!