Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

How I bypassed Amazon's Kindle web DRM

blog.pixelmelt.dev

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 538 posts

Re: How I bypassed Amazon's Kindle web DRM

#141

Post by matheusmoreira »

NoMoreNicksLeft wrote: post #130
dannyobrien wrote: post #98

Fun fact: this is one of the few situations in the US where a prosecutor could claim that this is criminal speech (though I hope and trust they would not, and if it did it would get thrown out by any court respecting the First Amendment). Not a civil issue, like libel or fraud, but the sort of talk that can get a policeman to come and drag you off to jail. If you've ever wondered why DRM is so roundly hated by engine…

That law should be changed. If you distribute your intellectual property with DRM, that work should forever be exempt from copyright protection. You get to choose one or the other, but never both, because DRM effectively removes the work from the public domain in perpetuity. Even accidentally releasing a demo or preview with DRM should invalidate copyright on that software/movie/book/whatever.

Not extreme enough. Copyright itself should be abolished straight up. It's the information age, the AI age. Artificial limitations nonsense like copyright does nothing but hold us back. Even the corporations think so: they violate copyright at massive scales on a daily basis just to train their AI models. Why rules for us but not for them? That particular hipocrisy should have caused the elimination of copyright worldwide.

Re: How I bypassed Amazon's Kindle web DRM

#143

Post by conception »

semiquaver wrote: post #108
dannyobrien wrote: post #98

Fun fact: this is one of the few situations in the US where a prosecutor could claim that this is criminal speech (though I hope and trust they would not, and if it did it would get thrown out by any court respecting the First Amendment). Not a civil issue, like libel or fraud, but the sort of talk that can get a policeman to come and drag you off to jail. If you've ever wondered why DRM is so roundly hated by engine…

> they made it against the law to even tell anyone. I’m no fan of the DMCA, but I am pretty skeptical of your apparent claim that this post itself is a potential violation of 17 USC § 1201. Obviously the act of circumvention itself qualifies, as does the code in the GitHub repository the post links to, but can you point to any prosecution of someone for a _prose description_ of circumvention (as opposed to actually m…

I see you don’t remember the dvd decryption key ordeal.

Re: How I bypassed Amazon's Kindle web DRM

#144

Post by limagnolia »

awesome_dude wrote: post #140
limagnolia wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amazon has exercised substantial market power to get publishers to do what they want. If they really wanted to, they could have pushed back just like they have in other areas.

No. For one thing, DRM also works in Amazon's favour (reselling multiple copies) For another, DRM is a pretty big sticking point for copyright holders, music, text, whatever. It's the one big thing that publishers all think that their business model depends on

Most music is sold without digital restrictions, and many video games are also sold without digital restrictions.

Re: How I bypassed Amazon's Kindle web DRM

#146

Post by justfix17 »

awesome_dude wrote: post #140
limagnolia wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amazon has exercised substantial market power to get publishers to do what they want. If they really wanted to, they could have pushed back just like they have in other areas.

No. For one thing, DRM also works in Amazon's favour (reselling multiple copies) For another, DRM is a pretty big sticking point for copyright holders, music, text, whatever. It's the one big thing that publishers all think that their business model depends on

Arguably not so much with music anymore given the prolific nature of lossless DRM free downloads available for purchase.

Personally, I buy more music now than any other time in my life: high quality sources playable on all my devices.

Re: How I bypassed Amazon's Kindle web DRM

#147

Post by mNovak »

dannyobrien wrote: post #98

Fun fact: this is one of the few situations in the US where a prosecutor could claim that this is criminal speech (though I hope and trust they would not, and if it did it would get thrown out by any court respecting the First Amendment). Not a civil issue, like libel or fraud, but the sort of talk that can get a policeman to come and drag you off to jail. If you've ever wondered why DRM is so roundly hated by engine…

Tangentially related to the question of legality of prose describing otherwise illegal instructions, I'm reminded of the epic DeCSS haiku [1]. (CSS here being 90's era DVD DRM).

[1] https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/DeCSS/Gallery/decss-haiku.txt

Re: How I bypassed Amazon's Kindle web DRM

#148

Post by semiquaver »

conception wrote: post #143
semiquaver wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> they made it against the law to even tell anyone. I’m no fan of the DMCA, but I am pretty skeptical of your apparent claim that this post itself is a potential violation of 17 USC § 1201. Obviously the act of circumvention itself qualifies, as does the code in the GitHub repository the post links to, but can you point to any prosecution of someone for a _prose description_ of circumvention (as opposed to actually m…

I see you don’t remember the dvd decryption key ordeal.

I remember it well. DeCSS was code, not prose. I maintain that an English description of the decryption process without the key would not be liable.

Re: How I bypassed Amazon's Kindle web DRM

#149

Post by monch1962 »

babblingfish wrote: post #122
chmod775 wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd rather donate money directly to the author. I will not under any circumstance still reward Amazon for what they're doing.

You could support your local bookstore. Bookstores are closing down all over the world. Most authors do not support a way to pay them directly. For example, traditionally published authors have all of their royalties handled via their agents. For a non-trivial amount of sales, direct donation would be an accounting headache for individual writers.

> Most authors do not support a way to pay them directly.

I think this is the problem that should be addressed.

Musicians went through a similar process in reverse order: first Napster ("piracy") then streaming services (analogous to Kindle/Amazon, where a huge 3rd party inserts themselves between content creator & consumer). Eventually some musicians twigged that they were getting screwed every way, so they set up ways for fans to pay them directly or via a less money-hungry intermediary (e.g. Bandcamp).

Not a perfect solution by any means, but if book authors feel their situation is bad enough, they could look into how musicians are dealing with it.

I'm probably not alone in thinking I'd far rather pay an author directly than Amazon or book publishers.

"Bookcamp", anyone?

Re: How I bypassed Amazon's Kindle web DRM

#150

Post by semiquaver »

LoganDark wrote: post #128
semiquaver wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> they made it against the law to even tell anyone. I’m no fan of the DMCA, but I am pretty skeptical of your apparent claim that this post itself is a potential violation of 17 USC § 1201. Obviously the act of circumvention itself qualifies, as does the code in the GitHub repository the post links to, but can you point to any prosecution of someone for a _prose description_ of circumvention (as opposed to actually m…

The post includes a link to a GitHub repository containing code to circumvent the DRM, which probably counts as "technology" and "component".

I covered that in my comment. It’s likely the code violates § 1201 but I doubt the post does. And linking to infringing content is not legally the same thing as publishing it.
Post reply on HN