If you buy a book, in the current age, you have two choices. Either you get a traditional book made from paper, or you get an electronic book or e-book made just of bytes. Both have their own advantages and disadvantages, some of them in the realm of ownership and copy right.
When you buy a book made from dead trees, the copyright and right of ownership usually is relatively friendly and has properties most people intuitively grasp and consider fair. You aren't allowed to make a hundred copies of the printed book and sell these copies or give them to your friends, and doing so, for paper books is quite a feat not many people would even try. You are allowed though to give the book to someone else or to sell it as a second hand book.
E-book copyrights & DRM
E-books are different. If the e-book is just a file, a file without what is called Digital Rights Management, it is technically easy to just make a thousand copies of the book and distribute them or even sell them. You aren't allowed to do so, but it's technically trivial to do. As a result of this technical ease with what clandestine copying of the work can be performed, the publishing industry reacted, over-reacted you might say, by implementing a form of Digital Rights Management that not only stops pirating from taking place, it also restricts the ownership rights and copyright rights of the person who bought the e-book quite a bit. You could say, if you buy a dead-tree version of a book, you at least own the copy you purchased, you can sell it, give it away, or use it to warm your house on a cold winter day by burning it in your fire place. If you buy an e-book though, and that e-book has DRM, you don't even own your own copy. That is, you are allowed to put your copy on your own e-reader, but you aren't allowed to sell or give away your copy to anyone else. No, even moving your e-book to a new e-reader can be a daunting task when DRM is there to make the process really hard. E-books, including e-books that don't apply DRM usually contain copyright notices that make it illegal to give away or sell ownership of the copy of the e-book you purchased.
As a reader, but also as an author of fiction, I've come to dislike DRM so much, that my own fiction now contains the following copyright notice:
Copyright Notice
This is the place where, in most eBooks you would find a difficult to digest hostile looking piece of legalese telling you that, although you bought the damn thing.
You can't really treat such a book like your property in the way you would a printed book. We shall have none of that nonsense here.
Basically, if you treat this eBook like you would a printed book then everything will be OK. You can lend it to friends and family like a printed book. Give it away like a printed book or sell it second hand like a printed book.
The below statements states the same in more formal language:
The copyright holder grants the purchaser the transferable right of ownership to this copy of this book under the condition that he/she makes sure no copies of this book remain that are under the control of others at the moment of transfer of ownership.
The copyright holder grants the current holder of the right of ownership to this copy the non-transferable license to lend a copy of this book to direct friends and family in a non-commercial way.
If you purchased this book through a vendor that has placed DRM restrictions on your copy that is incompatible with your above rights, you may contact the author and show proof of purchase in order to receive a DRM-free copy of this book.
NFTs on HIVE
The Ethereum blockchain pioneered the concept of Non-fungible tokens or NFTs. An NFT is governed by a special (ERC-721 or ERC-1155) smart contract on the Ethereum blockchain, and other than regular crypto tokens, NFTs are unique. The use of these tokens has mainly focused on unique, single owner artwork and on use in games.
NFTs on Ethereum work great for expensive artwork or other expensive real or virtual goods. They
don't work that great though for smaller inexpensive assets. The reason for this is that the gas needed to power the smart contract underlying the NFT is rather an expensive commodity. Selling a good worth €1,- using an NFT isn't realistic if the gas required to transfer ownership of the good will end up costing €5,-.
While Ethereum is the prime place where today NFTs live, it's not the only place. There is Wax, there is IOST, but there also is, as I recently found out, HIVE. I don't know the technical details of NFTs on HIVE yet, but the nftshowroom shows us what is possible from a user perspective.
Could we use NFTs for e-book copy ownership?
As defined in the epub standard, the META-INF directory within the epub container file can contain meta data and signatures, and on top of that a (currently free form, at least according to the standard) file containing DRM info. We probably don't want to touch the rights file for our application, but the metadata.xml file could be made to contain a unique reference to an NFT token. Then, with metadata.xml signed by either the platform or the publisher in signatures.xml could indisputably bind the copy of the epub to the NFT token and thus to the holder of the token.
I believe it should be technically doable to create an e-book proof of ownership platform on HIVE, Wax or IOST for e-books based on NFTs. With HIVE already being a platform with a large community of written word content creators, including fiction authors, HIVE NFTs would seem the most logical choiche for such a platform.
As an author, I would really like my fiction to become available through an NFT ruled system of transferable rights of ownership. What do you all think? Would NFTs make for a dood alternative for DRM in the e-book space? Would, as I feel it would, HIVE and the showcased NFT functionality on hive-engines be the best place for this?
As a developer and a huge fan of FlureeDB, I am tempted to look at e-book NFTs as a secondary project for my HIVE-Ads pilot project where I look into the use of FlureeDB as a side-chain technology (and potential future layer-0 technology) for HIVE. It's probably not a good idea at this stage in that project to branch out with overly ambitious side projects. Especialy as it would likely be duplicating work already done in hive-engines, and the hiveengine tool by @holger80
So for now, I'm just puting this idea out there. I think there is great potential for NFTs in the e-books realm, and I think with gas prices being where they are on Ethereum and with the writing community here on HIVE, HIVE would right now be the best place for these NFTs to live.