I am tracking this pretty closely – spoke with Kirk Biglione yesterday and have interviews set with Brian O’Leary, Andrew Savikas and Richard Nash in the next week for my talk at SFU’s Digital Publishing Workshop next week – and feel that maybe the book publishing industry will never be without some kind of DRM, especially as it becomes more pliable and transparent to the consumer.

That said, the era of big, easy one-stop solutions may be a thing of the past -egad! – and I think that decisions on DRM are going to be made on a title by title basis with varying degrees of protection going forward.

We are still very much at an experimental stage and need to collect more data. If the industry embraces the uncertainty with confidence and avoids piracy-hysteria it should figure it out just fine.

Keep up the great work.

This is according to a report by Patricia Akester, from the Centre for Intellectual Property and Information Law at Cambridge.

She found that the “evidence shows that some beneficiaries of privileged exceptions are being adversely affected by the use of DRM and practical solutions are required.” Her conclusion: “while the nightmarish vision of digital lock up has not materialised … significant problems do exist, and others can readily be foreseen.”

A sample:

The first preservation concern pertains to the fact that where DRM (applied to works in digital format or to ancillary software used to access those works) becomes obsolete and the relevant manufacturers are not willing to provide updates or have gone out of business, the British Library could find itself with digital content that it can no longer have access to and unable, by law, to circumvent. The obsolescence of a DRM could render an item hosted by the British Library inaccessible.

The second preservation concern is that, presently, where a DRM prevents copying (and the British Library is unable, by law, to circumvent) reproduction of a work for preservation purposes is impossible.

Akester’s research is apparently the first empirical study of DRM in the UK. It’s over 100 pages. I blogged a summary of it last May. Download the full report: Technological accommodation of conflicts between freedom of expression and DRM: the first empirical assessment.