JB's Place

DRM (Digital Rights Management) Sucks

As an author I like to make money. I do not like to make money for the sake of making money, but because making money allows me to address other needs in my life that ultimately allow me to then come back and write more. The money is the lubrication by which my life flows more smoothly such that writing can be a natural fruit.

Troublingly, however, we live in an age where the fruit seems to be constantly taken–especially when it comes to writing. The digital age has had the consequence of making what were normal boundary issues in ownership of a thing nebulous. Whereas knowledge was before bound in a physical book, now it is bound in zeros and ones. Whereas before there was a shelf life of a work that when enough people became aware of said work and enough time had elapsed that sooner or later it became common knowledge and in the public domain, now we cannot take anything for granted and must very carefully try to understand when a thing that is in the public domain may not be still in the public domain.

Not surprisingly, the first action taken when the future is unknown by creators is to “lock the fruit down” so only people with keys may access the fruit. Really, I am not so sure this is what creators tend to do, so much as it is what people who make money from creators do. DRM seems to be an issue for movie studios, for instance, more than for budding authors.

This is all well and good, except that built-in to this attempt to control who and what can read or see a work is the channel lock-in of the device reading it. What works on a Amazon Kindle may not work on a Barnes and Noble reader. Worse even that that, you might be locked out of a work you actually purchased due to DRM confusion within its own code.

All of this is to say simply that DRM sucks. What’s an author to do?

Thought Experiment Number One

Imagine a world in which money is not a factor. What would you do? I think you will find that more than likely, in such a world you will find a group of people with whom you will form some type of survival bond. Each of you will bring a talent to the group. You will do the talent for the group so that the group functions. This, we recognize as a very loose definition of tribalism. Do you worry about someone stealing your work in such a group? Probably not, since each of you knows what the skill set of the person in question is. If something goes missing that ties directly to that person’s skill set, it will not make any sense or give an advantage to the thief. Take the best hunter’s bow, and you are going to get a little hungrier for the act. The right tool goes to the right person for the right job, and collectively the group thrives because of this.

So Why Does Money Not Work Like This?

The easy, somewhat deceptively simple answer is this: because it is an abstraction. People have plenty of money who have done nothing whatsoever to benefit the existence of a group. In fact,many have plenty of money on the grounds of stealing or exploiting a group in such a way in many cases that it led to the group in question becoming extinct. Money has allowed us to remove the moral dimension and look instead to see who has a pile of cash instead. Hence, whe morality and the “right way to live” is not rewarded financially, no one values those values in the sense of cash-flow. Rather, this is an abstract system of “honor” in the outlined scenario that happens to be coincident or not with having a pile of cash.

My Solution

All of the funds of any of my bought books go to my church or synagogue. For those of you who get hung up on whether I can it a church or a synagogue, wonder for a moment why it makes you any difference? To that end, I have also elected to use zero digital rights management and offer an epub and a pdf as deliverables. Personally, I prefer the epub format because it is truly an “open format” whereas pdf is the format that is used because Adobe standardized it into being, but I realize that sometimes pdf simply renders better on some devices than an epub and vice-versa. My rationalization is simple: If you buy something like a book, you should be able to put it any damn place you want on any device you want. You should not have to buy the same book twenty times for twenty devices. One standard should run on all platforms and if that platform does not support that platform, you should burn it or run over it with a van. Anything else less than this is basically extortion that you are learning to put up with in your life.

But, Pirates!

Yep, pirates exist. Some steal because they can, some because they have no other choice. In either case, if you are stealing a meditation book, you are probably going to find more than you bargained for in the act of thieving. But even if it were not the case this were so–assume I had published a programming book instead–I would still make the same decision. Anytime you learn something, you will be expected at some point to give back or contribute to whatever it is you learned. If you could afford my book, and you chose to steal it, then you are ultimately depriving me of my ability to support myself to write more books. Perhaps one of those books I would have written might have changed the world. Since you did not support that value, you now get the job of trying to write said book or serving the purpose it would have served in some manner. In the meantime, it is not unlikely that you will discover that your own means of supporting yourself evaporates. Karma. She is a force.

Bottom Line

You get the book for five bucks that took me around 7 years and many thousands of hours of study and experience without any digital rights management on it so you can purchase one copy and read it on whatever device on which you wish to read. This is the way the world should work and the way in which it will work if it is to work at all for creators and readers in the future. If you get this book in a pirated form, then consider donating to it so that more books can be written. Creating more complicated locks and devices will not solve the issues authors face. Rather, when writing and information is valued and attribution and respect and acknowledgement is given where it belongs, the value will naturally flow because humanity is made to strive for something higher than its base needs. But should you think it is not, do not be surprised to find yourself walking the plank, matey.[^1]

[^1]: Don’t be a scalawag.

Introduction To How To Do Nothing Well

Meditation is a discipline that has remained fairly consistent over time. The image of a guru with his fingertips touching or the palms of his hands overlapped is a widely recognized icon.

Yet, most meditation centers on focusing on the breathing, and not much else. This is certainly a beneficial meditation, but it is not a meditation that most people will be able to do much with, other than notice their breath, which is important.

A more active meditation, where a person does self-maintenance, seems paramount. In a busy world, although it might be helpful to notice one’s breathing for awhile, it is not sufficient to kick in the higher consciousness in such a way as to operate from that higher mind in most situations. People simply think of it as relaxing, and nothing more.

On the other hand, if there were a way to view meditation as interrogating different components of one’s soul, one could use such a method to bring themselves into spiritual alignment. By seeing each area and what that area does or does not do, one can begin to make changes to themselves by paying attention to the data streams within their own personal energy systems.

Usually, people tend to do this through sleep. Sleep allows certain energies to bubble up that are otherwise unnoticed, and for these /images to be processed to varying levels. It is far better if a person can process these /images in waking life, and learn to interrogate themselves and become conversant in their own “soul language” so they can understand themselves and when they are on track, or off track.

Instead of meditation being a simple relaxation, it becomes more like taking one’s car to the mechanic to be sure that the parts and pieces are still functioning as they should. By being able to do this, a person can prevent health trouble before it arises, and keep their own mind more peacefully centered. By taking each component bit by bit, and putting it in the place it should occupy, the spiritual self starts to flourish and many unexpected changes can take place inside. Likewise, by being familiar with one’s own energy systems, one can then take this knowledge and apply it to others such that they can help to heal both themselves and others.

This, it shall be noted, is a bit different than meditations in the past. The goal of this form of meditation is no less than complete self-knowledge. It takes time and practice, and one must learn a new way of thinking that is more symbolic in most cases than literal. However, if one takes the time to develop this, then the possibilities really begin to open up as a person steps into the fullness of their being.

The Energy Systems of the Body

The energy systems of the body are an old art. It is hard to say when they were first traced out, or by whom. The only thing that can be said is that many cultures across time separated by distance seem to arrive at their own version of the energy systems which share certain commonalities. They all map out the currents and areas that energy flows, or does not flow, and encourage it to move by various methods.

Yet, just what are these energy systems? Most mysticism falters with the language to describe them, much as it is difficult to describe any fundamental concept. If one tries to explain what an atom is to a non-scientist, one quickly discovers how concepts one takes for granted to build upon prove problematic to explain to others.

The easiest way to describe these systems is by analogy. There are “circuits” in the body, that conduct energy, much like electricity. The human body acts much like a crystal and conducts these currents in various ways. The ability for the body to conduct this electricity says something for the health of it, for where this circuitry jams is where disease or dysfunction is likely to manifest.

Where does this energy come from? God, the universe. Whatever. What matters is that it is there, and needs to be maintained. What mediates it is consciousness, although often the consciousness has fallen into the subconscious which is where meditation arrives to raise awareness of this situation and facilitate release.

Just how did these cultures map out these paths? Well, evidently at one point, people were better able to see them visually. However, even if one cannot see them, one can feel them. The easiest way to conceive of this is to think of how it feels when someone steps into the room when you are otherwise occupied. That feeling that someone is in the room is somewhat similar to sensing energy flows. You might not be able to describe exactly how you know what you know, but you know it nonetheless because you feel it.

A more immediate experiment concerns rubbing your hands together palms facing one another roughly an inch or so apart. Naturally, you will feel heat, but you will also feel a sort of tingling or “heat above the hotness” on the palms of both hands. This is chi, or energy, or whatever word you want to use to describe the sensation is. If you do not feel much of this in your hands, it is likely that you are blocked. Most people are blocked in one way or another, but some people because of the natural resilience of their energy systems, might still feel more energy here anyway.

I will now issue a blanket statement that should be the centerpiece of anyone doing healing work–all healing takes place within this energy system–whether it be through some method like meditation, Reiki, or surgery. How might surgery achieve this? Well, certainly, by the time one has reached the necessity of surgery, the energy system has been stagnant for awhile to the point it has manifested as physical disease. By intervening at the physical level, the solution sought is to “bust this stagnation” at the spiritual level. It is simply a “level down” from the origin of the problem–like remedying an issue with a blueprint of a home by first building it in physical reality and then altering the blueprint retroactively as rooms are added or knocked down. It makes more sense to make such changes at the blueprint as opposed to wasting time at the “slower level” of physical reality.

So, we can see and understand that the body is, in essence, energy. A big distributor of the energy through the various meridians are the chakras. Chakras are major points along the spine that spin in a wheel like fashion. They act much like cogs inside a machine. Their job is to take in energy from the outside, and distribute it inside, as much as possible through the meridians. (The Indian word for the energy channels is “nadis”.) The problem, as previously discussed, is that these meridians can become blocked from our consciousness. However, it is not always the case that our consciousness remembers why such blockages are there, because some blockages do not originate from the current life, but from some other life, somewhere else.

Buy the book here.