Amazon and DRM changes

[issybird]

Let me be clear. There are shades of gray, but using ownership of a paper book to justify acquiring a pirate ebook is black. Use your own copy to make the digital book, as I said above. Calling it gray so you can have your cake and eat it, so to speak, is duplicitous.

[issybird]

Originally Posted by Patitapetit

Exactly. "Oh this is wrong said Karen"

Originally Posted by Patitapetit

100% Agree.

So which is it, dear?

[Quoth]

Originally Posted by haertig

Well, the rights holders say you can't remove DRM either. And I'm pretty sure the vast majority of posters in this thread do exactly that. It's hypocritical to chastise others for going against the rights holders wishes while doing the same thing ourselves*.

* "Ourselves" is referring to the membership here at large, not any specific individual.

No, copyright and DRM are different things. Removing DRM for personal use isn't violating copyright. Sharing or selling a copy that is in copyright (whether it had DRM or not) is a violation of copyright.

The rights of rights holders are to do with copies. Clue in the name!

[Quoth]

Originally Posted by issybird

Let me be clear. There are shades of gray, but using ownership of a paper book to justify acquiring a pirate ebook is black. Use your own copy to make the digital book, as I said above. Calling it gray so you can have your cake and eat it, so to speak, is duplicitous.

I think I would agree, so I'm baffled by US court decision on Google scanning books. Most are borrowed and it's not personal use, it's corporate commercial use to boost their advert sales via search. The scanned copies are on multiple servers and a search will reveal a few pages. I'm sure there could be a way using distributed attack to get all the scanned pages. Google/Alphabet conned the court.

I think it's grey sending the physical book to a 3rd party agency to get it scanned and totally wrong supporting a pirate site to get it.

[lkmiller]

Originally Posted by djrx

I agree. Removing any DRM, regardless of the reason, is a type of piracy. Whether you buy a paperback and scan it, buy an ebook to remove the DRM so you can use it on another platform, or remove DRM from KU to keep "forever", etc., in the eyes of the law, you're committing piracy.

There's only one of those scenarios where the author doesn't get paid.

[Quoth]

Originally Posted by djrx

I agree. Removing any DRM, regardless of the reason, is a type of piracy. Whether you buy a paperback and scan it, buy an ebook to remove the DRM so you can use it on another platform, or remove DRM from KU to keep "forever", etc., in the eyes of the law, you're committing piracy.

KU or a library yes. DRM on something you bought, no, unless you share or sell copies.

[NullNix]

Originally Posted by djrx

I agree. Removing any DRM, regardless of the reason, is a type of piracy. Whether you buy a paperback and scan it, buy an ebook to remove the DRM so you can use it on another platform, or remove DRM from KU to keep "forever", etc., in the eyes of the law, you're committing piracy.

As long as we're talking legal terminology, removing DRM isn't piracy. Piracy is boarding followed by robbery and usually kidnapping and murder on ships at sea.

Indeed removing DRM isn't even copyright violation -- since you can remove it and then choose to *not* copy anything: it is common to remove DRM which is so broken it's preventing you enjoying the work you bought a license to at all. This is why the US added an *extra* crime in the DMCA of removing 'effective technical measures' preventing copying -- which then had to have copious carveouts punched into it because it turns out doing that prohibits people from doing a whole bunch of entirely legal things that they'd been doing for decades.

The carveouts are so badly designed and so temporary (needing frequent renewal) that this still causes actual suffering, the latest example being people stuck with implanted medical devices (preventing MRIs, etc) whose owning companies have gone bust but which often no longer work thanks to lack of upgrades, but which can neither be upgraded nor removed without DRM-breaking information the owning companies refuse to provide.

Terrible legal drafting under pressure from powerful interest groups does not make something morally or ethically wrong, but I'd say that people whose eyes no longer work and cannot be made to work because of laws passed to make stripping DRM illegal without concern for consequences *does* show that those laws are ethically and morally wrong.

[Desertway]

At the very least, isn't breaking DRM a breach of contract? Amazon's Terms of Use are pretty clear. Nothing is forcing me to buy their books. The DMCA legal exclusions that I've seen generally involve accessibility issues, or providers going out of business, not simple convenience.

[Quoth]

Very many retail contracts are either invalid or unenforceable. Also to enforce a contract in most countries requires:
1) A civil case, not criminal.
2) The contract has to be legal under local consumer law, most are not.
3) Even if won, damages are strictly on the loss of revenue, not technically breaking a contract.

[Desertway]

Originally Posted by Quoth

Very many retail contracts are either invalid or unenforceable. Also to enforce a contract in most countries requires:
1) A civil case, not criminal.
2) The contract has to be legal under local consumer law, most are not.
3) Even if won, damages are strictly on the loss of revenue, not technically breaking a contract.

I see that all of that is the case. I suppose that many people are arguing that Amazon (and other tech companies) have a legally invalid DRM model. Is there a clear argument as to why that is?

(I'm not trying to make the argument personally. I spent years liberating my books until I decided it was just too much trouble. Now I just download and read.)

[NullNix]

Originally Posted by Desertway

I see that all of that is the case. I suppose that many people are arguing that Amazon (and other tech companies) have a legally invalid DRM model. Is there a clear argument as to why that is?

I'd call Amazon's one of the few examples of non-dreadful DRM, up there with Valve's, though it's still being used more as a competitive weapon than to stop license infringement. *If* you accept that the only legitimate use of an Amazon-purchased ebook is to read it with Amazon's software and/or hardware, it doesn't get in customers' way or stop legitimate uses of the purchased item. However, that's a distinctly contentious point. Why exactly *can't* we read an ebook we bought on a Kobo instead of a Kindle? The only actual reason is to provide Amazon with extra competitive weapons, and that's not a legitimate reason to deprive users of that freedom.

(Compare to Valve's DRM, which is so not-in-your-face that many Steam users don't know it exists at all. It doesn't force you to run games through Steam, it doesn't stop you copying the games as many times as you like... all it does is stops you running multiple simultaneous copies, and in the absence of a human being with multiple sets of heads this is not actually a problem unless you're planning to run more copies than the license permits. Of course even this is not flawless, since wanting to do that is fairly common: Valve is on record as wanting (more expensive) N-user game licenses to allow you and your SO to play simultaneously, but the game publishers won't hear of it.)

[ownedbycats]

Originally Posted by NullNix

Compare to Valve's DRM, which is so not-in-your-face that many Steam users don't know it exists at all. It doesn't force you to run games through Steam, it doesn't stop you copying the games as many times as you like...

Sometimes. But I have a few games that just outright fail to launch if Steam's not running.

[Desertway]

Originally Posted by NullNix

*If* you accept that the only legitimate use of an Amazon-purchased ebook is to read it with Amazon's software and/or hardware, it doesn't get in customers' way or stop legitimate uses of the purchased item. However, that's a distinctly contentious point. Why exactly *can't* we read an ebook we bought on a Kobo instead of a Kindle? The only actual reason is to provide Amazon with extra competitive weapons, and that's not a legitimate reason to deprive users of that freedom.

I get what you're saying, and you may well be correct. There are just some ideas here regarding rights, freedom, contracts and competition that all involve a level of discussion probably not appropriate here, and certainly not best discussed by me, neither a lawyer nor a philosopher. I was just curious about how others viewed the relevance of contract.

[Quoth]

Originally Posted by NullNix

though it's still being used more as a competitive weapon than to stop license infringement.

The KFX format always has DRM, you can't copy to another Kindle, even if the publisher requests DRM free.

So yes, it is more about Amazon than the copyright.

Edit:
Apparently you can copy KFX that publisher requested no DRM to later Kindles that do KFX, according to jhowell.
I thought it didn't work with our two PW3.
There should be no DRM at all, and certainly none when publishers request none.

[j.p.s]

Originally Posted by Quoth

The KFX format always has DRM, you can't copy to another Kindle, even if the publisher requests DRM free.

So yes, it is more about Amazon than the copyright.

I think jhowell has posted that KFX "publisher requests DRM free" books have a generic key that any KFX capable kindle can decrypt. Still violates the claim of no DRM, but not as much as you claim.