Quote:
Originally Posted by HarryT
I'm no lawyer, and I'm sure that you know more about these things than I do, but it seems to me that if you buy a Kindle, and accept those terms of service, you are agreeing (via that first part of the agreement that I quoted) not to reverse engineer or modify it. You're right, that's not against the law as such, but contracts can certainly "trump" things that would otherwise have been legal. Eg, it's not illegal to do more than 5000 miles a year in a car, but if you lease a car, and part of your lease agreement is that you won't exceed 5000 miles a year, you can most assuredly be required to make additional payment as a consequence, and taken to court if you refuse to do so.
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When you lease a car, you agree not to drive over a certain amount or face penalties that are spelled out in the contract.
When you buy a Kindle, you agree to not reverse engineer it--and if you do, Amazon can cut off your account. That's what the contract says. (That Amazon claims the right to cut off your account for any reason or none is another issue, but one that lawyers might be interested in--that implies it might not legally be a contract at all.)
Amazon can't charge you an extra $500 "software source material fee;" the contract doesn't stipulate extra charges. Amazon can't press charges for hacking just because you read the code they provided with software they didn't expect you to; they have to allow you to read it with various types of software to allow compatibility with OS changes.
There's no law broken in reverse engineering, just a contract (which may or may not be enforceable, but again, different issue); the terms of the contract only allow Amazon to shut off the person's account.
Publishing the results of reverse engineering could be a breach-of-contract leading to violation of trade secrets causing damage to Amazon... but that's several steps of "maybe." Amazon would have to, among other things, prove that such a move *cost them sales*, rather than "hey, now the OS crowd will buy Kindles because they can use them."
There's no legal right to control the use of one's products after sale. Amazon would be hard-pressed to explain how a "Kindle+" option similar to PRS+ was harmful to them.