Quote:
Originally Posted by Elfwreck
Even if Amazon could detect "drm-removed version," they're not authorized to do anything about it; they're not the owner of copyright, and they can't be appointed "copyright enforcer" with no other rights over the original material.
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But Amazon could be sued by a publisher or some industry representative group like the RIAA is for music to get access to the information.
The Redshirts case you present is interesting and encouraging. However, it doesn't speak to the general problem. First off you've identified a book published by TOR, a company that is already liberal with its DRM policy. Do you know of a retailer where you can buy George R.R. Martin's Game of Thrones ebook without DRM? We could go down the New York Times best seller list at this point and ask how many of these titles are sold by any of the retailers out there without DRM. I would guess we would get a fairly small percentage.
Now let's say you bought all the books on the New York Times bestseller for over a year. What is the probability that you got access to a DRM free copy legitimately for ALL those titles? In other words the more DRM free books you have in your collection the more it looks like you either pirated your collection or removed the DRM yourself.
I somewhat regret using Amazon as an example because Amazon is only a problem in the sense of how they like to monitor things. I don't even know if they track DRM-state. In a certain sense this is all hypothetical to illustrate the problem that your decision to strip DRM may not be as private as you think it is. I'm sure Amazon doesn't want the PR nightmare would ensue if they actually started punishing their customers with this kind of information. An industry group representing the authors\publishers though could probably care less just like the RIAA.