[eschwartz]

Originally Posted by Robotech_Master

And those Mobileread users who are likewise?

And you'll notice there too, someone made sure to clarify the matter.

That still doesn't mean anyone should be sued over it, but it never hurts to clarify things. As twowheels said there (and I said on Teleread) we don't want people to get the wrong idea and try to scotch calibre.

It only matters because it is always better to be careful when matters might potentially get legal.

But merely over semantics, that would be a pointless quibble.


FWIW, the MR veterans tend towards the non-sloppy end of things.

Language is sloppy. People use shorthands all the time, because that's just how it works. If I say, "You can use a VCR to record a TV show" am I wrong wrong WRONG because the VCR won't record it unless you put a tape into it first?

If Abbey House says "You can use Calibre to remove DRM," and someone google "Calibre remove DRM" and finds Apprentice Alf, installs the plug-in into Calibre, and subsequently removes the DRM, was Abbey House wrong? How did they not use Calibre as part of that DRM removal process?

A VCR has an intrinsic function to interface with tapes. Similar to the way a computer doesn't mean anything without a hard drive.
And VLC is fundamentally tied to its codecs.

calibre is not intrinsically tied to removing DRM, in fact it operates quite well without DeDRM plugins at all. It is thus factually wrong to say that "calibre" removes DRM, or even that it is part of the process -- any more than Windows was part of the process (assume for the sake of argument an example case of DeDRMing was done on a Windows PC).
Windows was also used as part of the process -- it served as a framework to launch a GUI, which in turn launched calibre, which in turn launched the DeDRM python library.
With a little extra manual labor, you can even remove calibre from the equation.

Again, this is all meaningless semantics, because we don't usually quibble about sloppy shorthand... except in this case, the potential confusion could have negative repercussions if the wrong people get confused. And that is not being fair to Kovid.