Strangely, I couldn't find any of these reports available for free download and in the public domain...
No, but I bet if you pay for them you get them as PDFs, unencrypted, which you can view on a vast breadth of devices and OSes and applications, annotate/modify, clip parts out of, convert to other formats, and otherwise manipulate as you please, with no arbitrary technological restrictions getting in the way. (Compare to, say, Adobe Digital Editions wrapped PDFs, which can only be read in designated apps and limit you to the capabilities of those apps.)
with no arbitrary technological restrictions getting in the way
How does the arbitrariness of those technological restrictions differ from the arbitrariness of the legal restrictions which I'm sure the author would insist upon, should you decide to republish their work? To me they are the same thing - mechanisms for saying "you might've bought this but the original owner still has a say in what you do with it".
The world IMHO is a better place because there are mechanisms by why IP creators can be paid. Yes there is poorly written DRM (Sony, we're looking at you) but that is a problem of execution, not one of concept.
> How does the arbitrariness of those technological restrictions differ from the arbitrariness of the legal restrictions which I'm sure the author would insist upon, should you decide to republish their work?
One of those is decided by a democratic process, the other is dictated by one party.
> but that is a problem of execution, not one of concept.
Actually, it is a problem of the concept. It is asking for computers to be robbed of their defining characteristic, and to be put under dictatorial control.
See also Cory Doctorow's talks on the topic, like maybe this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gbYXBJOFgeI (he gave this and similar talks in many places, you can find quite a few of them on youtube, I have no clue whether this particular one is good)
No, but I bet if you pay for them you get them as PDFs, unencrypted, which you can view on a vast breadth of devices and OSes and applications, annotate/modify, clip parts out of, convert to other formats, and otherwise manipulate as you please, with no arbitrary technological restrictions getting in the way. (Compare to, say, Adobe Digital Editions wrapped PDFs, which can only be read in designated apps and limit you to the capabilities of those apps.)