"This message will self-destruct after reading". Sounds like something from Mission Impossible? Think again. This is the latest technology, and it is called a "time-out e-book".
e-Books are the latest thing. Traditionally you bought a book made out of paper, read it, lent it to a friend, gave it away to a charity stall when you lost interest in it or kept it on a shelf to reread years later.
The problem with this is that each physical book contains only the text of one book. If you only have one book you can store it on a coffee table, but if you have more than one you need bookshelves, or even a library.
e-Books solve this problem, since each e-book reader (a PC, laptop or purpose-built computer) can hold the texts of thousands of books. This introduces some inconvenience, including the cost to the reader, having to hold or carry a computer wherever you need a book, reading for long periods from a computer screen, being unable to annotate the pages, only allowing one person to access all the texts at a time, and so on. Imagine sitting in the bath holding a laptop to read a novel and you get the idea.
If the e-book becomes popular, however, a much larger problem exists for publishers: how to stop the e-book being copied.
e-Book companies such as Adobe have installed security devices to prevent copying. But as Russian programmer Dmitri Sklyarov explained to a Las Vegas conference in mid-July, these security systems are not very effective.
(The e-book industry responded by having him arrested for his impudent research. He has now been charged, and the latest information on the campaign to defend him can be found at <http://www.freesklyarov.org>.)
The latest solution comes from RosettaBooks, named after the profoundly important Rosetta stone that provided the key to modern understanding of Egyptian hieroglyphics.
While the Rosetta stone has survived thousands of years, RosettaBooks' new system causes books to expire after 10 hours. You pay for the book and start reading. After being viewed for 10 hours the words disappear. Perhaps it is appropriate that the first title is Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None.
Jack Valenti is head of the Motion Picture Association of America, and a crusader for IPR (intellectual property rights) and DRM (digital rights management), terms used to describe the defence of corporate property in the internet era.
These rights in the movie industry include dividing the world into zones and deciding who can and can't see what movie when. His current campaign is to defend the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which criminalises public discussion of software security systems used to protect copyright. The DMCA is the legislation under which Sklyarov is imprisoned.
You may have thought that it was only the continued profits of giant corporations at stake. But Valenti told the US Progress and Freedom Foundation conference held on August 21, "If copyright is diminished or shrunk, allowing entropy to set in, the country is the loser".
Entropy can be described as the process by which the universe dies. With such high stakes, how could we object?
BY GREG HARRIS (<gregharris_greenleft@hotmail.com>)