301–310 of 538 posts
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Elcom_Ltd . Found not guilty, but he was charged and tried.
Being found not guilty supports my contention. But that case was about distributing circumvention software, not traditional speech. Obviously distributing software that bypasses DRM is directly addressed by the law.
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I wonder when/where did they make it against the law to even tell anyone. I remember(1) time when law guys made illegal (in US i believe? or EU?) creating software that circumvents certain DRMs, so I made plans to create a txt DRM that would rely on having a preambule like this : !copy !save if there is a !copy the text editor would not allow you to copy the text (like the acrobat reader does), and !save would not al…
Your idea has a precedent. The Serial Copy Management System (SCMS)[1] is a DRM standard built into digital audio tech like DAT, MiniDisc, DCC, and consumer audio CD recorders. It works by adding just 2 bits — but no encryption or obfuscation whatsoever — to the digital audio signal that tell the recorder if further digital copying is allowed. Importantly, SCMS only ever blocked making a digital copy of a copy — you…
Wait, does this (absolutely ridiculous) DRM completely fuck up screen readers?
Yes and no. I actually wrote the code to make this work with screen readers, back when I worked for Kindle in 2018. I even got to test it out with a few Amazon employees who were blind, which was a really cool experience! We added some hidden divs which had the plaintext version for screenreaders. For whatever reason, upper management was ok with the plaintext being scrapable, as long as the formatted version couldn'…
> For whatever reason, upper management was ok with the plaintext being scrapable, as long as the formatted version couldn't be scraped.
I guess it’s either “formatted version is slightly better and typesetting is hard to get right” or “well we’ll have plausible deniability in case publishers ask us where’s our DRM”. Probably both. Still doesn’t make a lot of sense to me though.
Thanks for sharing!
The Kindle DRM situation is really bad right now. It used to be possible to install the DeDRM plugin in Calibre and get decrypted KFX files from the Kindle for PC application. That hasn't been possible since early 2025. The pros can still break it but they aren't sharing with the rest of the class anymore. > Even the maintainer of the DeDRM plugin has gone underground, refraining from issuing an official new release…
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Books have got to be the least expensive form of entertainment out there. The value to cost ratio is incredible. Consider buying books to support authors and publishers. If you can't afford it, then libraries are nice too. I personally know people who pirate books, but pay hundreds of dollars a year for streaming services or battle pass type video games. It blows my mind. Books are so cheap people! I recently bought…
I have more than 100 books that I bought with actual money on Apple's iBooks (or whatever it was called back in 2010-2012). I no longer use an iPad and would like to be able to read them on my Kindle. Because of DRM, I can't. I'm all for supporting authors and the various editors, etc., but I feel like I've already done that in this case.
In the present case, Amazon clearly states that the customer is buying a book, so it should work the same way as buying a physical book.
One solution would be to buy a DRM free digital version.
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'll do you one better: 2600 Magazine was prohibited from saying which website hosted DRM-circumvention code:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_City_Studios,_Inc._v...
They were legally prohibited from saying, on their own website, words like "You can get DeCSS from http://lemuria.org/~tom/DeCSS/" and nothing else. Criminalised speech.
The Github repo (which was working for me until 5 mins ago) just 404'ed. https://github.com/PixelMelt/amazon_book_downloader Kind of expected, but I was surprised at how quick that was.
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…
Remember when it was illegal to export strong cryptography from the US? There was no law to restrict that, so they just made something up. It basically went like this: Problem: we can't make cryptography exports (software exports) illegal -> what actually IS illegal to export? -> munitions! -> let's just declare that cryptography is "munitions" -> problem solved https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Export_of_cryptography_fr…