Fight to Repair Daily: July 27, 2022
Audiobook giant Audible uses Digital Rights Management for evil – plus hackers take on BMW's heated seat subscription. Also: A Tale of Two Blenders
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📚 Why none of my books are available on Audible: And why Amazon owes me $3,218.55.
Today, Audible dominates the audiobook market. In some verticals, their market-share is over 90 percent! And Audible will not let authors or publishers opt out of DRM. If you want to publish an audiobook with Audible, you must let them add their DRM to it. That means that every time one of your readers buys one of your books, they're locking themselves further into Audible. If you sell a million bucks' worth of audiobooks on Audible, that's a million bucks your readers have to forfeit to follow you to a rival platform.
As a rightsholder, I can't authorize my users to strip off Audible's DRM and switch to a competitor. I can't even find out which of my readers bought my books from Audible and send them a download code for a free MP3. Even when I invest tens of thousands of dollars of my own money to hire professional narrators to record my audiobooks, if I sell them on Audible, they get the final say in how my readers use the product I paid to create. If I provide my readers with a tool to unwrap Audible's DRM from my copyrighted books, I become a copyright infringer! I violate Section 1201 of the DMCA and I can go to prison for five years and face a $500,000 fine. For a first offense. (pluralistic.net)
A tale of two blenders
In the past couple of months, two of my blenders broke down, which means that I’m actively looking for a replacement. One of the blenders must have been 8 years old and used almost daily. The other one was used sporadically and just turned 2, so it was just about too late to return it, but perfectly in keeping with the obsolescence targets.
I got agitated when the latter broke down because, unwillingly, in being forced to replace it, I found myself supporting a company that champions waste and doesn’t see pollution as a major issue in the current environmental crisis. My eco-minimalistic mindset and minimalistic lifestyle choices are in sharp contrast with business strategies that turn the simple act of buying into overbuying.
I rebel with all my senses against planned obsolescence, which has dominated people’s lives for way too long. The only winners in planned obsolescence are the corporations and the people who run them. As consumers, we keep spending money on products that shouldn’t be replaced every season like clothing or shoes, or every few years like appliances and electronics. (impakter.com)
🍗 An Economy of Overfed Middlemen
One central problem in our commerce is the outsized role of middlemen. Amazon, Walmart, Vizient, CVS, Google - these are monopolists, yes, but their specific mechanism for exerting monopoly power isn’t controlling production of some item, but in putting themselves in the middle of transactions and taxing one or both sides. Here’s a poorly drawn example of how Google’s search business operates, which will hopefully illustrate the problem.
Today, this middleman model is so pervasive that venture capitalists are now promoting investment models based on explicit violation of antitrust laws. Take a seed fund called Equal Ventures, launched a few years ago with a specific thesis of looking for middlemen monopolist. In a Medium post, one of the founders noted that his venture invests in monopolization, which, though it feels quaint to say this, is literally outlawed by the Sherman Antitrust Act. (BIG)
Reparability scores: helping consumers choose more sustainable products
We recently talked to Isabel Lopez-Neira from the sustainability team of the European Consumer Organisation on how reparability scores help consumers.
If we want to extend the lifetime of products, we need to overcome several challenges. Speaking about where we would need to get to, Isabel lists that “first, products should be designed to last longer without failure”. Second, “When products break down, repair should be easier and more affordable”. And third, “Consumers should have trustworthy and comparable information to identify the most durable and repairable products on the market.”
We still have a long way to go. “The problem starts in the first place with a lack of more sustainable products in the EU”, Isabel says. “What makes it even more complicated is that sustainable products are barely identifiable. Confusing information and a great variety of industry claims make it difficult for consumers to find the more sustainable products”. (European Commission)
Hackers Already Prepared To Screw Up BMW’s Subscription Heated Seat Model
Earlier this month BMW took ample heat for its plans to turn heated seats into a costly $18 per month subscription in numerous countries. As we noted at the time, BMW is already including the hardware in new cars and adjusting the sale price accordingly. So it’s effectively charging users a new, recurring fee to enable technology that already exists in the car and consumers already paid for.
The move portends a rather idiotic and expensive future for consumers, and hackers and tinkerers aren’t having it. Grey market hackers have already been fiddling with BMW systems for years, providing users greater control over things they already own. st at Bimmer Tech, a BMW coding firm, told Motherboard in an email.
BMW has a history of claiming that any kind of tinkering invalidates a user’s warranty. Since the seat heating tech already exists in the car that users have paid for, claims that enabling it violates warranties could result in BMW running afoul of the FTC’s new crackdown on right to repair violations. (TechDirt)