I blogged briefly yesterday about ESBN, a way of branding individual copies of digital content (an idea that doesn't make me all that happy because it plays into the hands of copyright totalitarians). There's not a lot on the ESBN site about who's behind it, so I sent a letter to the info address and received the following helpful explanation from Chris Matthieu, presented verbatim (although I added the links because it was a pure text msg):
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I am the founder of ESBN.ORG. Some of my previous start-ups include: GetVocal.com, MayWeHelp.com, and PizzaOnline.com.
While trying to determine which format of an e-book to purchase online, my wife (Beth) came up with a brilliant idea to combine or compile an e-book and a reader on a memory stick that could be attached to your keychain. She called this idea a BookFob (http:// www.esbn.org/bookfob/). Being a developer, I built this application for her to market. To ensure that no one could copy this e-book and freely distribute copies on the Internet, I needed to create a unique identifier that could be associated with the serial number of the memory stick to "lock" the media to the memory stick. The e-book is basically non-functional without the specific memory stick that the unique id is coded to run.
BookFob's unique id turned out to be the ESBN. After further research, I determined this problem was not unique to BookFob. ISBN seems to handle this problem well in the brick and mortar world but it does not work in the online world where you need unique ids for each copy of the digital media rather than one for only the title. The ESBN.ORG site was designed to be the next generation ISBN.ORG solution. After the site was built, word seemed to spread quickly about the potential uses for ESBNs. These additional uses now include copyright registration, digital ownership assignment and reassignment, and even digital media encryption keys.
We are currently working with Writely and ZohoWriter to embed ESBN functionality into their online word processing solutions. We have FireFox Extensions and Widgets/Gadgets also in the works.
For more information on ESBNs, please direct your browser to http:// www.esbn.org/esbn/faqs.asp.
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[Tags: books isbn esbn chrisMatthieu drm libraries]
Posted
by D. Weinberger at January 12, 2006 09:53 AM
Comments
ESBN.ORG allows authors (like yourself) to submit content to the service and receive real-time, unique IDs to prove coyright. The ESBN database can be used as a nonrepudiation source of content by retaining works of authorship in the state that they were filed along with the date/time stamp of submission and referenced postings or publishes.
This service is great for syndicated bloggers, columnists, free-lance writers, and even average writers like myself. I use this service for copyrighting my documents, ideas, and blogs.
Think about the benefits here for a moment. In principle, digital media or content such as compiled e-books and software could be registered to a user on a central service. Digital media owners could basically sign into ESBN.ORG and trade or sell their media legally. You are not allowed to do that today with music or software or even e-books for that matter.
ESBNs are free and available to anyone with an account. There are web services that allow you to integrate ESBNs into other services.
Posted by: Chris Matthieu | January 14, 2006 09:31 PM
Or you could use a Creative Commons license so that more of our ideas and expressions can be shared.
I'd like to see our copyright fanaticism weakened, not enabled. Hence my skeptical tone.
Posted by: David Weinberger![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://www.hyperorg.com/blogger/nav-commenters.gif)
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January 15, 2006 10:43 AM
ESBN site is no longer up. Any word on what's happening?
Posted by: Anonymous | September 7, 2006 02:43 PM