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I'm genuinely curious - what is the "light" side of DRM?
But I'm well aware in this case that I'm not purchasing any long term licenses.
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The right sale doctrine doesn’t apply to products like these; these are licenses to use. If they were first sale doctrine products, you could sell your goods on secondary markets, which you cannot.
So does the first sale doctrine not have any teeth at all? What is to stop companies from throwing a license on everything they sell, making the first sale doctrine meaningless? Could a bookseller add a license to a physical book, and suddenly you can't sell it or lend it out?
Probably. I mean, they're already selling physical items laden with DRM (DVD/bluray), presumably in those cases they are selling you "a license to watch the disk." The ability to restrict first sale of DRM'd movies is probably on their TODO list I'd wager, or their list of greatest regrets.
Incidentally, years ago, they did manage to invent a self-destructing DVD obsensibly for rental-without-return purposes. Technology Connections has a good video about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ccneE_gkSAs
> Microsoft will refund customers in full for what they paid, plus an extra $25 if they made annotations or mark-ups. Doesn’t seem all that nefarious. Get your money back, order the paperbacks. No DRM issues again.
That's still showing the dark side of DRM. However it is also Microsoft handling that dark side in a professional way. If a game developer shuts down their game servers, do they release the binaries? Some do, I guess. I've even seen some software companies release the source if/when they shut down.
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Engineering has the concept of “fail safe”. It literally means that the failure mode is a safe mode. If the dns of the DRM server can no longer be reached, a fail safe would allow the book to continue to be read.
Wouldn't it be easy to fool such a check?
And this is why I only 'buy' eBooks if they're dirt cheap (<$5). Even then if I really enjoy them I'll buy a physical copy.
I wager there will probably come a day when Amazon refuses to send newly purchased ebooks to old models of kindles.
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Any recommendations for such stores? I know of https://www.downpour.com for audio books and I get all my audio books from them since they are DRM-free. Would love to know of such a service for ebooks, but for fiction.
It's not the same as buying DRM free, but stripping DRM from most eBook formats is pretty trivial these days, afaik. Unless something has changed in the last few years since I last bought a kindle edition of a book (which I stripped of DRM so something like this couldn't happen).
The dark side of physical books: sometimes you buy a book and then you lose it.
Sometimes Barnes & Noble break and enter my house and take off with my bookshelves. Oh wait, nevermind, that's never actually happened.
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It's not the same as buying DRM free, but stripping DRM from most eBook formats is pretty trivial these days, afaik. Unless something has changed in the last few years since I last bought a kindle edition of a book (which I stripped of DRM so something like this couldn't happen).
It’s not trivial for Kindle anymore. I did it recently on a Mac, and it took a fair bit of work, was complicated and confusing, and required finding an old version of the Kindle reader program and somehow preventing it from checking in with Amazon’s servers. My brother in law recently tried and failed after having done it in the past.
Incidentally this model of Kindle also comes with text-to-speach, which is a really nice feature which I believe is missing from all newer models (removed to avoid cannibalizing audio book sales.)