I'm a bit worried at those who blithely advise that its totally legally OK to remove DRM from DRMed ebooks and its the only sensible course of action to take.
For one, the provisions of the DCMA actually do bar DRM stripping explicitly. There is a fair use exception , but its not clear that it covers all the uses Mobile Readers say it covers. Backup and archive yes: sharing with others no. Even then, that's just my opinion; a federal court judge might say no.
The DMCA isn't the only applicable law either: there is also the EULA under which you "purchased" the ebook . The Amazon EULA states thusly:
Quote:
|
No Reverse Engineering, Decompilation, Disassembly, or Circumvention. You may not modify, reverse engineer, decompile, or disassemble the Kindle or the Software, whether in whole or in part, create any derivative works from or of the Software, or bypass, modify, defeat, or tamper with or circumvent any of the functions or protections of the Kindle or Software or any mechanisms operatively linked to the Software, for example, by augmenting or substituting any digital rights management functionality of the Kindle or Software.
|
Seems clear to me.
People here pretend that these EULAs don't count,(because nobody reads them) but a federal court may well say that they do, and that maybe folks SHOULD read the fine print before they "buy" stuff. Its even more likely that the federal courts will so find, because there are legit means of backup and archiving ebooks. See
HERE
This is in addition to Amazon's free archive service to all consumers.
Now of course all of the digerati are yelling, " What about if the company goes out of business, or switches formats? "
Well, the last time this happened was in 2006- a technological eon ago. Amazon isn't going to go out of business overnight and isn't going to piss off a gazillion customers by switching DRM schemes overnight. Speculating about that makes about as much sense as speculating about a Japanese invasion of the USA because such an invasion occurred in the past.
And if they did, so what? In both cases, the company would have abandoned their right to enforce that particular DRM scheme. From a LEGAL point of view, circumventing an ABANDONED DRM scheme would then be completely OK.
Again, I'm looking at things from a legal POV. The "DRM is morally EVUUL like child molestation" crowd may be OK with advocating winking at the law, but I just wanted to make clear to any lurkers that the statement " the only sensible course of action ... is to strip DRM " is false. You do have options-CLEARLY LEGAL options.
Ok, back to regularly scheduled programming.