[speedlever]

Copied from Apprentice Alf's Blog:

"As we have said many times, we are strongly against piracy. But we are for “fair-use” rights.

Pirates can and do create ebooks even if no digital copy of the book exists (Harry Potter anyone?). They have been doing that for a long time. Pirates can always fall back on scanning a hard copy and creating a pdf.

Therefore, DRM can not really do anything to prevent actual ebook piracy.

The truth is that DRM is actually about enabling vendor lock-in. Forcing you to stay with the vendor given your large investment in ebooks so that they can enforce a license agreement to “rent” you the book at prices far above “rental” prices and approaching or surpassing full paper book prices. Vendors like Amazon want to take away your “fair use” rights. They do not want you to be able to archive the book as html (so it never gets lost) and they do not want you to convert it to your favourite reader format.

The problem is Amazon is now getting nasty about it.

In the space of a few short months, their developers have completely revamped their “secure storage” of the information needed to remove the DRM on both of their Kindle for PC and Kindle for Mac applications.

They have now added code to their Kindle application that tries to prevent a debugger from attaching, detects when a debugger is being used, and literally changes the path the code takes on the fly depending on whether the process with that pid is being debugged or not. So any use of a debugger will result in deliberately incorrect information/code paths being selected with incorrect data DRM data being used which will result in ebooks that won’t open triggering the need to “re-register” with Amazon.

It has been a good fight to protect our fair use rights, but given the fast approach of encrypted binaries and sandboxing, coupled with now active detection/counter-measures for using a debugger, it is a fight we are very soon going to lose. I hope Amazon and others like them are proud of themselves."