Will Random House Learn from the Sony/BMG Fiasco?

Over at The Da Vinci Crock, Kodewulf posted the following comment:

"I know this is a bit off-topic, but if you see what Sony did with the new DRM fiasco, then it's very easy to understand all the underhandedness that Random House are displaying. It seems that Bertelsmann got a finger in the pie with everything that's shady."

In fact, Kodewulf pre-empted a blog post I was going to talk about here because the Random House/Bertelsmann connection with Sony/BMG's covertly installed hacker rootkit came to mind when I read about Random House's own digital "pay per page" project.

Significantly, nothing that Random House has announced mentions any sort of digital rights management controls or system. Will purchasers of material be allowed the same sort of fair use as one who purchases a dead-tree version? Will purchasers be allow to print out the pages? Cut and paste? Will they have to buy special viewer software (can you say "Peanut Reader?").

All of those restrictions are among top reasons that ebooks of any sort have not caught on with consumers ... that plus reader devices that suck. However, I was initially excited about ebooks for my Palm PDA ... until I bought Peanut Reader and fiund that -- I could not print, underline, cut and paste etc ... what a load of ...

One might hope that they'd learn from the Sony/BMG fiasco and blizzard of lawsuits ... but then, you'd think that publisher's would have learned from the experience of the music industry in general --- something that has not happened.