Content vendors operating like this has cost me a lot of money. Not in terms of lost content, but in hard drives. I steadfastly refuse to relinquish control of anything I've paid for, so nearly every piece of licensed software or entertainment I've ever purchased has a pirated copy tucked safely in my archives.
Amazon turned off customer’s Kindle account, blocking her from her books (2012)
121–130 of 250 posts
Re: Amazon turned off customer’s Kindle account, blocking her from her books (2012)
#122Please tag this as 2012. It would be interesting to see a summary of this issue since then -- has Amazon made this into a regular problem for their customers?
I've seen this problem on /r/bestof on reddit - submitting 2011 comments and such, when everyone implicitly assumes comments submitted are present comments.
IMO any sort of news/event post that's not recent (say, in the last month or so, or at least within a year of the posting date) should be required to add a "[2012]" (or whatever year it was posted) to the end of the title.
Re: Amazon turned off customer’s Kindle account, blocking her from her books (2012)
#123This is why I try to get drm free ebooks when possible or at least breakable drm. I like paying for it so the author gets paid but i don't want some 3rd party being able to revoke my access.
"I like paying for it so the author gets paid "
I've been thinking about this: If this is the only reason you use an ebook-store (like the Kindle store), this would be fairly easy to create a 100% competitor for - after all, there's no law against creating a site for giving money to your favourite authors!
...and then you could create a plugin/API for embedding a "pay for book" button onto other sites - like pirate book sites, and the ONLY weapon Amazon would have against it would be the legal weapon against the pirate sites!
Also you'd probably want the give-authors-money site to be run by a trustworthy nonprofit.
Re: Amazon turned off customer’s Kindle account, blocking her from her books (2012)
#124Earlier quoted context omitted.
What store sells ebooks legally and doesn't have similar ToS?
I usually go to the publishers or, if self published, authors website directly and buy from there. Books are distributed as epub that I can load on my ereader calibre alike.
You keep saying this, but you leave out the fact that not that many publishers sell direct, and most popular books are not available in this manner.
So yes this works _sometimes_, but not most of the time.
For the majority of users who are looking for a very specific book, not just _any_ new book to read, buying it digitally means buying it from a DRM-laden marketplace.
Re: Amazon turned off customer’s Kindle account, blocking her from her books (2012)
#125Earlier quoted context omitted.
If people don't know I guess I agree, though with the question of: should they have known? If people do know but choose not to consider what may happen, they had that education you mention but disregarded it. I can't feel too sorry for them. > I don't think victim-blaming is a great way to educate people What would be a better way, specifically?
If you try to point out all this to someone, the usual response is that they don't care, it doesn't happen to them. I have been trying this since Steams first versions and more or less gave up by now. People value convenience above all else.
That, or "people" make their own educated decisions about the trade-offs they are accepting, and those may be different - yet equally valid - from your own decisions.
Re: Amazon turned off customer’s Kindle account, blocking her from her books (2012)
#126Earlier quoted context omitted.
Kindle's DRM is breakable for at least half a decade now using this calibre plugin: https://apprenticealf.wordpress.com/ I find it more convenient to break it than DRM-protected ePub files sold elsewhere (Barnes and Noble, Kobo, etc.).
Except that the new Kindle DRM is very hard to remove and this plugin won't work anymore - it's a constant arms race where us customers are always the losers.
It's possible, if a little annoying. In your account settings, Amazon offers the ability to download an e-book to transfer via USB. This gets you a version that you can import into Calibre and process with DeDRM.
Re: Amazon turned off customer’s Kindle account, blocking her from her books (2012)
#127Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think it is fair to pin this on steam. Plenty of games on steam run without steam, and require no installation - just copy them over to a different PC. They often come with binaries for all supported OSes at once, so your windows install will work on linux too. It is the game publishers that choose to use steam drm. Often the same publishers publish on GOG without the drm (since gog, admirably, does not offer…
No, it's in the agreement when you sign up for Steam. You don't own, you license.
Well the only owner is the copyright holder
Re: Amazon turned off customer’s Kindle account, blocking her from her books (2012)
#128Please tag this as 2012. It would be interesting to see a summary of this issue since then -- has Amazon made this into a regular problem for their customers?
I've seen this problem on /r/bestof on reddit - submitting 2011 comments and such, when everyone implicitly assumes comments submitted are present comments. IMO any sort of news/event post that's not recent (say, in the last month or so, or at least within a year of the posting date) should be required to add a "[2012]" (or whatever year it was posted) to the end of the title.
This is already the rule on HN, the submitter must have forgotten (it happens!). A mod will likely change the title.
Re: Amazon turned off customer’s Kindle account, blocking her from her books (2012)
#129Message is very clear. If you want to own something, pirate it.
My sentiments exactly, I see no reason to support a model where I pay for something and it turns out that I'm not even an owner because there's a mention of it somewhere deep in the 500 page EULA. Which totally mirrors the experience of going to the bookstore, picking a book paying for it and... that's it, you can do whatever you want with it. I'm sure someone will point out that I agreed to these terms but the last…
I don't think we should have to sign Eula, if i can buy a book without one, why cant I buy a game in the same manner? You are, equally, not allowed to duplicate and resell either of those.
Re: Amazon turned off customer’s Kindle account, blocking her from her books (2012)
#130Honestly? I'm okay with this business model. I know it's not a popular opinion here - but as there's no reasonable way to prevent people from unrestrictedly distributing copies, the business model of licensing books sounds reasonable to me. What's not reasonable is the lack of transparency when you're suspected of abuse. I understand that there are many bad actors, but these companies are judge, jury and executioner…
Publishers like O'Reilly explicitly don't put DRM on ebooks you buy from them. They also have a subscription library model in parallel. I use both these methods for books from them and I understood the difference. Somehow O'Reilly remains one of the premium and presumably profitable tech book publishers
Which is a shame, because O'Reilly stopped selling ebooks more than three years ago: https://www.oreilly.com/content/the-mission-of-spreading-the...