Terrific post by Cory Doctorow on the setting of his latest novel, set in what he calls “Enshittification’s Dawn”:
[T]oday’s master enshittifiers, like the inkjet companies that have used software locks to raise the price of printer ink to $10,000/gallon, which is why you print out your shopping lists and boarding cards with colored water that costs more, ounce for ounce, than the semen of a Kentucky Derby winner.
Perhaps the tastiest morsel in this post is the summary of a 100 page-collection of internal Apple memos from 1997. There, Woz and Randy Wigginton discuss the feasibility of copy protection for floppy disks; realize they can “trivially bypass” any system on the market; and conclude that the companies peddling these “copy protections” are selling defective goods and probably know it. After which Apple shelved copy protection and “decided, in effect, that software vendors would need to have to work with their customers, not against them.”
When it comes to code, I’ve always been just a lowly scripter, not a software developer. But as a writer, modern DRM—after the DMCA took away anyone’s rights in this arms race except from corporate middlemen like Amazon “who do not create, finance, edit, or publish our works”—affects me personally:
If you’re an author whose Kindle or Audible titles are sold with DRM, you can’t authorize your readers to convert those files to work on independent apps, even though you hold the copyright to those books. You don’t hold the copyright to Kindle or Audible’s DRM, after all, which means that it’s a felony for you—the author of a book—to help a reader get it out of Amazon’s walled garden. That means that once you start selling into Amazon’s walled garden, you can’t afford to stop, no matter how badly the terms of the deal degrade. Your readers can’t leave Amazon, so you can’t either, so Amazon can take ever-larger shares of your income and demand ever more unfair terms and you can’t do anything about it.
For books that I publish traditionally with a publisher, I don’t mind that much. But for self-published works, whose content I usually make available under a Creative Commons license, I wouldn’t dream of putting them up on Amazon, and I never did—while it’s the 800-pound gorilla in the room in terms of book sales, self-publishing on Amazon is so titanically enshittified for authors and independent publishers alike that I’d rather hawk my books on street corners than sell my soul to KDP.