philip lelyveld The world of entertainment technology

Chill out, DRM’s not the reason that guy lost his (public domain) Google ebooks

In a story making the rounds on the internet, a Georgetown professor lost a bunch of books he’d downloaded from Google when he traveled to Singapore. But this isn’t an example of DRM run amok.

At Boing Boing, Cory Doctorow picked up the story under the headline “Cross a border, lose your ebooks,” writing that the episode “points out just how totally, irretrievably broken the idea of DRM and region-controls for ebooks is.” And the story is still getting play today.

Except…DRM had nothing to do with this episode, and in fact, O’Donnell hadn’t actually bought the books in question. They were all public-domain titles, which he had downloaded from Google for free.

In addition, Google reached out to Gizmodo to “explain that this is not normal or intended behavior for the Google Books app, but instead the result of a bug. Google Play stores will not allow additional purchases while in territories where they do not operate, but this active removal of content was apparently an isolated issue unrelated to normal Google Books DRM behavior.”

Boing Boing hasn’t corrected its story.

Read the full story here: http://gigaom.com/2013/08/22/chill-out-drms-not-the-reason-that-guy-lost-his-public-domain-google-ebooks/?utm_source=General+Users&utm_campaign=90f8cc4063-c%3Amed+d%3A08-23&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_1dd83065c6-90f8cc4063-99147229