DRM and Contract Law

This space is devoted to a directed study in progress in Emerson College’s Publishing and Writing Master’s Program. Over the course of the next three months, this site will host a series devoted to exploring the means of protection publishers use to manage intellectual property in electronic form as well as the ways in which this protection can be better suited to authors, readers, and a growing market for electronic texts.

Table of Contents

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DRM and Contract Law by Victoria Sandbrook is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

 

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Introduction

As avant garde as the term “e-publishing” may sound, it is certainly not a new concept. In 1971, Michael Hart created Project Gutenberg when he decided to hand-code the first 100 e-books to be offered online to the general public. Almost forty years later, Project Gutenberg offers nearly 30,000 titles created with care by technology …

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History

As technology seems to push us forward faster and faster every year, it’s important to remember that publishing played a vastly significant part in the development of human history and modern culture. Year after year, publishers allow authors to share with the world information of every imaginable variety: personal anecdotes, dark fantasies, visions of the …

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Current Trends

The national news outlets have been doing a fair enough job covering the worst of the publishing industry’s most recent news, but in the hullabaloo, so little attention has been paid to the issues that could make or break the future of publishing, especially in relationship to electronic publishing. How exactly are authors being paid …

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Critical Voices

Bloggers simply can’t have all the fun in the world of electronic publishing. True scholarship in the publishing industry can be hard to find, especially when data and finances are so often held under strict lock-and-key at the level of the publisher’s office, much less with Amazon’s reluctance to share hard numbers (until recently of …

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Popular Perspectives

In a world that relies on minute-by-minute updates about everything in life, it’s no wonder that so many well-known blogs on publishing have popped up to become trustworthy sources and influential pundits. This section gathers only a few of the most reliable in order to start painting pictures of what users and readers really see …

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Conclusions

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