Every now and then, I get the occasional (and usually angry) e-mail from one of our readers, normally about to become one of our former readers, who proclaims himself disgusted at the state of digital rights protection and has decided to do away with anything that is not completely free of any artificially imposed bonds. My answer to them is, usually, that there hardly is any digital right management protection on our products at all.

I think that, as commercial publishers go, we have one of the most liberal policies in terms of rights management. Our PDFs can be opened on practically any platform, using nothing more than a standard PDF 1.4-compliant reader—including OSX’s built-in Preview and xpdf. All that’s needed to open them is the customer’s original password—nothing more. You can then cut-and-paste text, print at will and otherwise use the PDF file in whichever way you feel appropriate. Naturally, we don’t want our products to be copied and distributed by others, but the only real device that prevents them is the watermarking—clearly visible—on the front page of our magazines and the headers of our books. There is nothing that ties a download to a given machine, for example.

There are also no hidden “security features” aimed at revealing the names of those who break the holy bonds of our contract and—gasp!—decide to steal our content. Frankly, if you feel that you have to steal a $5 magazine, or even a $30 book, you have bigger issues to deal with. Of course, you could be really poor—but then I could point out these building, commonly found everywhere, called “libraries.” EIther way, I don’t see the point in the massive witch hunt on which so many publishers seem to be intent; I prefer to spend my time giving you reasons to behave honestly—such as convenience, better quality, good service—than trying to catch you if you don’t.

The Mouth and The Hand
The one thing that really does surprise me is how many people seem to be convinced that DRM is, in fact, the product of a massive conspiracy aimed at imprisoning knowledge. If you belong to this group, you probably have no idea how I wish you were right.

There’s a great quote by Steve Jobs that I think neatly sums up the current state of affairs with DRM and DMCA-like legislation:

When you’re young, you look at television and think, There’s a conspiracy. The networks have conspired to dumb us down. But when you get a little older, you realize that’s not true. The networks are in business to give people exactly what they want. That’s a far more depressing thought. Conspiracy is optimistic! You can shoot the bastards! We can have a revolution! But the networks are really in business to give people what they want. It’s the truth.

The sad reality is that the “massive conspiracy” is really nothing more than the natural response of certain powerful societal forces to a simple condition: pigheadedness. It goes a bit like this:

• Believe it or not, when you hear those Hollywood executives telling you that piracy is destroying their business, they probably believe it far more than you think. They are convinced of it, because it’s far easier to blame something unmeasurable, like piracy, than actually spending the time to figure out what’s wrong with their business models.
• Hollywood types tend to have two big assets: lots of money, and lot of charisma, both qualities (the former, in particular) that are attractive to other people, like, say, politicians, who see an easy way to make money by catering to these people.
• Lots of money plus ready-made legislation equals profit for a whole range of other players that exist solely for the purpose of catering to the IP owners’ insatiable thirst for more control over their products.
• Money in the hands of these new players, who become large and powerful because fighting piracy is, essentially, a lost cause, arouses even more political interest (“Did I, uh, hear a briefcase open?”), thus pushing the process forward even more.

If you accept the initial premise of needing a scapegoat for diminished success, everything else follows as a simple set of inevitable consequences into what looks like a gigantic conspiracy but is, essentially, much less exciting and original.

The Inevitable Conclusion
In general, the only time when I am bothered by DRM is when it truly limits my choices. For example, I don’t care if the music I buy from the iTunes store only works on my iPod because (a) I can buy it elsewhere if I need to and (b) I’m perfectly happy with my iPod—my choices are not really limited, although my convenience may be (but, honestly, I’ve never really had a problem with that).

On the other hand, it really disturbs that I have no way to buy a legal copy of my favourite TV shows in high definition. It bothers me that I can download better-quality videos from the Internet than I can legally buy from a store. That’s just plain stupid. And, by implementing a DRM mechanism that makes it impossible to make backups, movie and video producers have virtually assured that I will stay as far away from Blu-Ray and HDDVD as possible. I have lost enough CDs and DVDs to scratches and accidental drops to know better.

As I wrote a few years ago in one of my exit(0) columns on php|architect, illegal copying is a form of mass protest, and what its adversaries don’t seem to understand is that it takes away from their hands a valuable communication tool with their customers. The vast majority of people I know copy illegally for two reasons: either (a) they’re curious and wouldn’t have bought the product in the first place or (b) think that their choices are being limited one way or another.

By actively repressing illegal copies, all IP owners are doing is angering the people in the first group—who couldn’t give a damn about their products in the first place but may now choose not to buy the ones they normally would out of spite—and preventing the second from passing along the valuable piece of information that something is amiss. This can only result into further impoverishment of the quality of their product, and further decline of their sales.

I get a lot of e-mail. On an average day, my inbox will see around 250 “good” messages that require some level of attention from me, as well as several thousand spams—most of which are, of course, caught by our various server- and client-side filters.

Having to deal with 250 messages every day is a pretty big problem. I don’t subscribe to the concept that one should answer all e-mail at fixed times during the day for two reasons: first, some e-mail does need to be addressed immediately. I can be coy and let people know that I’ll get around to it when I get around to it, but it’s just not my style. Second, some e-mail requires more time to be answered than the rest, and none of the e-mail strategies I’ve seen deal with that. Finally, a good strategy needs to deal with archiving messages in such a way that they can be retrieved easily when needed.

For the longest time, I took the common approach of organizing my inbox in a hierarchical folder structure organized by topic, or sometimes by person. Clearly, this approach doesn’t work for a number of reasons: mislabel an e-mail, and the chances that you’ll ever find it again are… small. Plus, it’s difficult to keep track of which e-mails still need attention.

About nine months ago, because that system was performing so poorly, I switched all my mail to Gmail in an attempt to get a grip on it. Unfortunately, I kept using Gmail as a “normal” MUA, and after six months I had had about enough of it. In the meantime, though, all the mail I was receiving was still accumulating on my main e-mail address, because instead of just setting up an alias, we had set up a forward. The resulting mess of 250,000 e-mails was not easy to clean up, and I still get the evil eye any time it comes up in staff meetings.

The Solution: Triage
After returning to a GUI-based MUA (I use Apple Mail), I was determined to find a simple but efficient mechanism that would let me handle e-mail without making too many compromises while avoiding insanity.

For the last couple of months, I have adopted a system that is borrowed from the way triage works in emergency rooms. It’s simple, and it works really well.

First of all, I now only have four folders:

• Inbox—I ignore it completely
• New—this is a “meta” folder in which all messages that are marked as unread are shown
• Flagged—these are messages that I have flagged for later examination
• Archive—these are messages that I have decided to keep and that arrived before the beginning of the current month

When a new message arrives, it automatically shows up in my “New” folder. This way, I can immediately see which e-mails I haven’t yet considered. When I look at my new mail—usually a few times an hour—I can take one of four actions:

• Reply—if a message does require some sort of reply, I try to reply to it immediately only if it either requires a very quick note or if it cannot wait until the end of the day.
• Flag—otherwise, if it requires a reply but it’s neither urgent nor can be solved quickly, I flag it for future action.
• Keep—assuming that the message is something I want to keep for the future, I do nothing; it will disappear from my “New” folder and stay in the Inbox.
• Delete—if the message is spam, or if it doesn’t require an answer and I don’t want to keep it, I just delete it.

As you can see, an e-mail that doesn’t get acted upon right away is, at best, archived and, at worst, immediately deleted. In either case, I won’t consider it again. This makes for a very significant incentive to pay attention to what I’m doing!

End-of-day and End-of-month Tasks
At the end of each day, I go through my flagged messages and triage them again, deciding which ones can be answered in the time left before I leave work (and keeping their relative importance in mind). At the end of the month, I move all messages from the Inbox into the Archive (I have further split the latter into individual folders for each month so that it never grows to gigantic proportions).

Dealing with Mailing Lists
I treat mailing lists messages like regular mail, with the exception that I never archive them; unless I want to respond, they’re history.

Does It Really Work?
Well, it works for me. On average, my “Flagged” folder has less than twenty messages at the end of any given day, and it’s never gone above 25. My day has definitely become more productive, because I don’t have to worry about keeping track of e-mails, and I haven’t had to sacrifice the level of immediateness that electronic messaging entails. As with everything else, YMMV.

As you can see, I’ve moved my blog to blogger. It was a very difficult decision to make—and one I’m not sure will work out in the end.

Until now, my blog has been hosted on our servers using WordPress, a software that I have somewhat grown tired of. Recent versions of WP seem to have suffered from significant feature creep, and the continuous updates made keeping up with all the plug-ins and security patches more time-consuming than actually writing blog posts. This seems to be a sort of leitmotif for PHP systems—instead of focusing on building a common infrastructure that allows them to develop small applications that do one thing well, developers seem to be hellbent on writing systems that are capable of doing everything… only not all that well.

But I digress. Regardless of my personal reasons, I stopped blogging primarily because maintaining the blog was taking more time than I actually have to dedicate to blogging, and it didn’t seem like it was worth the effort. After playing for a (very short) time with the idea of using some of our own infrastructure to build a blog system the way I want it—something that we will probably do at some point in the future when more of our community initiatives come into the wild—I’ve decided that it’s best to just outsource the whole thing to someone who has already done a good job of it and, for once, not give in to built-here syndrome.