You have to wonder where the copy-control / DRM thing will end up. Certainly Richard Stallman’s The Right To Read seems less like Sci-Fi and more like prophecy with every passing year.

And now, the Sony Librie (link via Boing Boing – and there’s a couple other reviews around too). At last, an eBook reader that is starting to approximate paper in the way it is used. Or so you might think. There’s one quite disturbing aspect of the Librie: the “books” loaded on it are rendered unreadable after two months. This is deliberate – it’s not a bug.

It’s easy to imagine publishers lapping this stuff up – authors hopefully less so.

But I hope no-one’s buying this shit. The invention of the printing press, and the destruction of a small minority’s stranglehold on learning was one of the fundamental building blocks of western civilisation. Yet technology can now return us to a point where what we read/write/reproduce – or in fact any media consumption or use – can be controlled remotely by a small group of people.

That doesn’t sound like progress to me.