Quote:
Originally Posted by sirmaru
The problem is that they are NOT YOUR eBooks. You only buy a license to READ that eBook.
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When someone sells something and someone buys it they negotiate and agree to terms. In this case Amazon sets the terms. There's no opportunity for negotiation.
I'm all for supporting Amazon. I buy nearly all my ebooks from them and I'm glad to do it.
But ebook DRM imposes some restrictions that a lot of people don't agree with and since there's no penalty for stripping the DRM it's a trivial matter to avoid those restrictions.
The important restriction, to my mind, is that if someone decides to change the brand of reading device they use to, say, a Kobo, maybe a few years down the road when the Kindle has evolved into something they no longer like, they would no longer have access to their books. They bought the right to read them and they want to make sure they can read them. That seems entirely reasonable to me.
Do any of you remember about 15 years ago when Barnes and Noble got into ebook publishing for about 2 or 3 years and then decided to drop it. I think that was on the Palm platform if I remember correctly. With about a month's notice they ceased to allow downloads. If you changed devices you were out of luck. You lost the book. It happens. I think I lost a book or two but they were books I'd read and didn't plan to read again. But a lot of people lost a lot of books.
Yes it is illegal to protect yourself from this but there's virtually no chance of getting caught. There's no harm done to Amazon or to the publisher or author of the books.
Whether this is illegal or immoral are two entirely distinct issues.
It is illegal, according to the DMCA, to defeat encryption. It's a felony, in fact, with pretty severe penalties. But that means nothing if there's no possibility of enforcement.
If you believe that it's immoral to break a law then you can argue that it's immoral as well. But I'm sure you recognize that the vast majority of the people, those who drive 5 mph over the speed limit, for example, don't believe that.
I have some questions about this "right to read" idea, also. I just finished reading a book on my Kindle, "Peony" by Pearl S. Buck, that I read probably 50 years ago. I bought it in paperback. Admittedly I've long since lost that paperback so this is only half an example, but if I still had that paperback would that give me the right to download a pirate copy of the book to read? After all, I paid for the right to read it already.
I love to read and I want authors and publishers and Amazon to make a lot of money from my reading so they'll keep working hard to give me good books to read and good devices to read them on. That's a practical matter for me and that's sort of where it ends. The rest is all philosophical mumbo-jumbo.
Barry