Adobe in Wonderland - Company Business and Marketing

Industry Standard, The, March 26, 2001 by Lawrence Lessig

Adobe Systems, maker of many things great, and especially the portable document format suite of cross-platform tools, has gotten itself into the e-book market with a new product, the Adobe Acrobat eBook Reader. Marrying the PDF to a free, multiplatform reader, Adobe has begun both to sell and to give away books that are read and stored on a machine. Some of the books that Adobe offers are within the public domain -- no longer protected by copyright. One of these public-domain works is Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.

For a time, if you downloaded Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and were obsessive enough to read through the "permissions," you would discover a list of things Adobe would not permit you to do. Under the "Copy" heading the permissions said: "No text selections can be copied from this book to the clipboard." Under "Print" it indicated: "No printing is permitted on this book." Under "Lend" users were told: "This book cannot be lent or given to someone else." Under "Give": "This book cannot be given to someone else." And, finally, under "Read Aloud" the permissions page asserted: "This book cannot be read aloud."

It is this last nonpermission that made Adobe's Alice famous. A plain reading of the "permissions" makes it sound as if the firm is trying to control, in addition to everything else, whether parents may read a children's story to their own children. And that control struck most (though, in the company I keep, not all) as absurd.

Adobe quickly corrected this impression. It did not mean, its representatives insisted, to restrict the right to read the book aloud. That was a data-entry error. And, more fundamentally, "read aloud" does not mean read aloud. When Adobe says "read aloud" they mean "Read Aloud" -- which refers to a voice function within the eBook Reader software that enables it to "speak" the book aloud. So by this "permission" not to "read aloud," what Adobe meant was that its reader did not have the capacity to "read aloud" the electronic text. "Permission" means "capacity."

Remember, this is Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, and the adventures don't stop there. It turns out that Adobe has a special meaning for just about every word on its "permissions." When Adobe says "lend" it doesn't mean lend; it is referring to a function that enables users to forgo the rights to a book temporarily, while someone else has them. "Give" does not mean give; when Adobe says "give," it is referring to a function that enables users to permanently forgo the rights to a particular book, when they "give" it to someone else. And when Adobe says "print" (as in "No printing is permitted on this book"), it doesn't mean printing on the book; it apparently means printing of the book.

Those who read the "permissions" and believed that by "permissions" Adobe actually meant permissions -- they were simply confused. Here the March Hare would scold: "Then you should say what you mean."

Adobe tried. It quickly released a new version of Alice's Adventures, this one with a different set of permissions. On the version I have, I am permitted "to copy 10 text selections every 10 days" and "to print 10 pages every 10 days." The e-book still "cannot be lent" and "cannot be given," but now it "can be read aloud." (Though it is still not clear to me what "read aloud" means, as I still can't get my version to "read," or rather to "speak.")

Adobe is not the only one struggling to work out what "e-book" means. Many companies are developing technologies to make it easy to deliver content and easier to control the content that's delivered. The crunch comes when the means of control in cyberspace become more powerful than the means of control in real space.

In real space, when we buy a book we have the right to lend it, or sell it, or give it away. We certainly have the right to read it aloud and copy it -- not just 10 times, but maybe more depending upon our use. Real space sets a baseline of rights that cyberspace publishers need to account for: Should the rules on books in cyberspace be more restrictive than the rules on books in real space? Or should e-book sellers strive to construct a system in code that is as balanced as the system in law that exists in real space?

This issue affects more than books. Every form of digital content -- music, film, software -- raises the same question. In each case, the issue is how much control the seller should exert and how much freedom the buyer deserves.

This is the ambiguity about "copyright" in cyberspace: When cyberspace was born, the copyright mavens panicked that content in cyberspace could not be controlled. But they quickly learned that "could not be controlled" simply meant "under the original version of cyberspace." As the code changes, what can or cannot be controlled changes as well. Hence the possibility that the code protecting copyright in cyberspace will be much stronger than the law protecting copyright in real space.

So what's a company like Adobe to do? To its credit, Adobe's system shows some serious thinking about the problem. Rather than constructing a system that gives it perfect control over the use of the content it makes available, Adobe is designing into its code equivalents to the freedoms that exist in real space. The "give" and "lend" functions are great examples: They mirror the capacities that real space guarantees. Just as in real space, when I give an Adobe e-book away, I don't have it anymore. When I lend it, I don't have it while someone else does.