Quote:
Originally Posted by flandroid
Recent court decisions in the US have actually ruled in favour of the consumer and categorised as 'fair use' the stripping of DRM for the purpose of crossing platforms (ie: stripping dongle code to install software on machines for which the dongles don't work, ripping DVDs to netbooks without optical drives for travel, &c). It is very, very unlikely that you'd see any kind of conviction if you were 'caught' stripping DRM from books you bought from the Kobo store so you could transfer them to your Kindle. You might be in breach of the user agreement for the device, and maybe ( maybe) Amazon or Kobo would kill your existing accounts, but a judge would probably find that the material has been paid for and no harm was done.
As for the regional market issue, isn't solely a result of protectionism, nor is it petty. Morris Rosenthal has a couple of interesting blog posts from a few years ago here and here that, while written from a self-publishing perspective, might shed some light on the international publishing landscape, rights-wise. |
There are plenty of folks who disagree with the above reading of the DRM ruling. My understanding was that it applied to situations were you could not reasonably get ahold of the content and that it specifically applied to Test To Speech on the Kindle. So that a person could strip the DRM that blocked the ability to use TTS when there was no reasonable alternative for someone with a visual handicap to listen to the book.
Since there are multiple e-readers and e-reader apps that can be used to read books, it would not be reasonable to say that you cannot read an e-book in a different format and cannot legally strip the DRM. Someone who is blind or has some other visual impairment who who has a Kindle and cannot buy an audio version of the book can strip the DRM so that they can listen to the book using TTS.
This is how I see the ruling.