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How I bypassed Amazon's Kindle web DRM

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Re: How I bypassed Amazon's Kindle web DRM

#321

Post by reassess_blind »

latexr wrote: post #296
reassess_blind wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whether it’s correct, and whether you can argue it in court against a multi-trillion dollar company’s legal team are indeed two very different things. I wouldn’t be confident in court, but I would be confident that most users expect that ebooks they “bought” in the past could be viewed on their new Kobo eBook reader.

> Whether it’s correct, and whether you can argue it in court against a multi-trillion dollar company’s legal team are indeed two very different things. Exactly. And because this conversation started because someone was asking about suing them, what you can argue in court is what matters for this thread. I don’t agree with what Amazon is doing and thus don’t buy DRM ebooks from them, but that’s beside the point of th…

You’re right. The answer to whether they could be sued for this is obviously yes, because they have been, and Amazon won.

I got sidetracked. Really, my only argument is that that your theatre comparison is flawed.

Re: How I bypassed Amazon's Kindle web DRM

#323

Post by tpxl »

harshreality wrote: post #250
WithinReason wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here is a breakdown of how much money the author gets (from Fabien Sanglard): https://fabiensanglard.net/gebbdoom/ When I upload the PDF on Amazon, a minimal price is automatically calculated. In the case of the DOOM, Amazon sets the minimal price at $51.35. There is a slider which authors can use in order to add their "share" on top of Amazon price. I have added $3.88 which Amazon also takes a cut on. The result is…

Isn't he talking about the print copy?

Print copy: 57% of the price

Amazon: 40% of the price

Author: 3% of the price (half of which goes to taxes)

Re: How I bypassed Amazon's Kindle web DRM

#324

Post by mycall »

chrisco255 wrote: post #318
immibis wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The USA has a lot of criminalised speech, despite the 1A. The most obvious historical example is "I am going to assassinate the president tomorrow at noon", but recently there have been a lot more things you can't say, such as "Fuck Donald Trump" which got someone arrested and deported.

One can have a visa revoked for any arbitrary reason, as they are a guest in the country and not a citizen. But yes, obviously serious threats of violence are not protected speech.

I wouldn't be surprised if publishing circumvention code would be argued in court to be violence against earning money for political oriented books (spending money is a necessary and inseparable part of political communication).

Re: How I bypassed Amazon's Kindle web DRM

#325

Post by UltraSane »

aidenn0 wrote: post #194
UltraSane wrote: post #187

Any book DRM is easy to defeat now that OCR is so good. Just automate screenshotting and OCRing every page.

Have you tried this? I think you'll find OCR (at least free OCR) isn't as good as you think it is.

It is very good in my experience. It has been very good for a long time. Adobe Acrobat has long had the ability to OCR scans and replaced the raster fonts with custom generated TruType fonts.

Re: How I bypassed Amazon's Kindle web DRM

#326

Post by Sammi »

chrisco255 wrote: post #318
immibis wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The USA has a lot of criminalised speech, despite the 1A. The most obvious historical example is "I am going to assassinate the president tomorrow at noon", but recently there have been a lot more things you can't say, such as "Fuck Donald Trump" which got someone arrested and deported.

One can have a visa revoked for any arbitrary reason, as they are a guest in the country and not a citizen. But yes, obviously serious threats of violence are not protected speech.

Which would explain why foreign tourists to the US have been decreasing recently.

Re: How I bypassed Amazon's Kindle web DRM

#327

Post by pxeger1 »

amiga386 wrote: post #307
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…

> but can you point to any prosecution of someone for a _prose description_ of circumvention (as opposed to actually making code available)? 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:/…

> I'll do you one better

I think this is a weaker example.

Re: How I bypassed Amazon's Kindle web DRM

#328

Post by 0xEF »

fainpul wrote: post #273
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…

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…

Not that I agree with it, but I do see the logic. The word "munitions" can be replaced with "materials," since it literally refers to materials used for warfare. That isn't necessarily limited to things that shoot or explode. It's a brilliant bit of pedantry if you step back and think about it.

Re: How I bypassed Amazon's Kindle web DRM

#330

Post by PostOnce »

I had a kindle with buttons once, and it was good.

Then, I bought a touchscreen kindle paperwhite, and found out that every time you change books it complains that it cant find the cloud, and won't let you categorize anything unless you register it and be online.

That's enough Amazon for me, no point in finding out a second time for hundreds of dollars that they still piss me off.

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