Quote:
Originally Posted by Piper_
Regarding the stripping, not a lawyer on the planet would try to go after someone who stripped DRM for accessibility reasons like this.
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I'd be much less concerned about lawyers and much more concerned about mindless scripts that do what someone told them to do, not what someone wanted them to do. Sure, Amazon (or any other vendor who did it) would take a bath in the press when the details came out, but at that point, the damage would already be done.
I can easily see the following scenario: Some Amazon script gets, from each Kindle, a list of all books and their DRM status. It then compares the DRM status with that of the books when bought from Amazon. If it finds one that has been de-DRM'd, it outputs an automatic letter, contents of your choice, to be sent off to the person in question.
I wish I was just imagining things. I remember a case a few years ago where the MPAA sicced their lawyers on a guy who was "obviously" sharing a movie file ... based solely on the file name. The file was actually some data he'd created, and was a fraction of the size of even the smallest movie, but it had a name which could have been that of a movie (some common words that applied to both the data and the movie) so he was guilty until proven innocent, and had to come up with the money for lawyers to prove that this file was not their movie -- he had to prove a negative beyond a reasonable doubt. That was clearly done by some badly-written script, which only checked file names, not contents or even sizes, and then fired off the "pay up or else" letters based on those names.
Amazon itself is unlikely to be butt-stupid. Most human beings (with the possible exception of those who work for AT&T) are smarter than that. But scripts aren't. Scripts will do exactly what they're told to do, even when that isn't what they're supposed to do. And I'm not sure I'd trust Amazon, possibly upon request of various publishers, not to run such a script. They look so nice ... so shiny ... so impressive to management ... until all hell breaks loose. And, of course, I could be wrong about the whole intelligence thing. Amazon
did, after all, go in and delete
1984 from its customers' Kindles. Short of
The Gulag Archipelago, I can't think of a worse book they could have chosen.
Which is a long way of saying I'd be rather paranoid about anything involving device vendors and DRM where said vendors could do something automated, simple, and damaging. To err is human; to really foul up requires a computer. Stupidity happens. I try to avoid opportunities for automated stupidity to land me in court.