Quote:
Originally Posted by scotty1024
The law on Digitial Rights Management systems and the breaking thereof is not murky at all. Unless you have a valid exemption: it's illegal (unless of course you lie somewhere where it isn't the local rule of law).
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However, publishing code in a text form that breaks the DRM if it were run as a program is a clearly protected (and previously litigated) excercise of your first amendment rights. Somewhere around here I have the t-shirt of the program that broke some of the original DVD protection.
Selling the program may be illegal, running the program may or may not (again, you get into exceptions, country of sale/possession issues, etc), but publishing the program's text (and the "artistic expression" of directions on how to use it) are protected (just like directions on a recipe).
Amazon probably didn't care much until the ipod app took off - it's become a worldwide access point to their digital catalog. Although there are legitimate uses of the kindlepid program (the ability to rent library ebooks, which actually pay the authors more than print copies), if the Kindle were the hardware to have and only Amazon sold DRM content worked on it, it might actually put pressure on other sources to remove DRM (since non-drm content works just fine and was a selling point/feature of the K and K2).
In actuality, of course, the PID is being used by the unscrupulous to buy a single amazon version of a file and then sell off illegal copies (of course, they can still do this will all other mobi versions, so the drop in profit for them would be negligible, were this a real argument -- all other versions of mobi pretty much have to have open PID's that the end-user can type in to the store/library system). Stopping you from knowing the PID also doesn't block any non-US sales (where Amazon is more likely to be violating author rights contracts on a massive scale, but only due to lies of geographic location entered by their customers).
The main problem is actually at Amazon's end - despite owning mobipocket, they are separate companies and have licenses/contracts between them. Those are no doubt more of an issue - why would anyone in their right mind buy from other mobi vendors if you could get the same book from Amazon for any mobi licensed platform. It breaks the exclusivity (and high prices) of non-kindle mobi stores/hardware.
Then again, some idiots think people still want "books as apps" over on apple, with another one released recently in the near $30 range (no, I don't remember the exact title, but suspect it's $10 to $15 in the amazon store, can be read on all your kindle devices, not just the iphone and doesn't count towards your app limit).