Back when Randall Munroe released his “What if” in eBook format, it essentially was only available with DRM.
When I emailed him about it, asking for a place to buy it without DRM, he responded with DRM unfortunately being mandated by his publisher, and finished his email with a link to this comic of his:
https://xkcd.com/488/
I would recommend people buy their books off ZLibrary instead, where they come with no DRM.
Fuck you Jeff!
This entire thing has been made needlessly complicated. Easy fix though.
- Get whatever ebook you want.
- Borrow some code from GitHub and teach a raspberry pi with a camera and a few servos to snap pictures of pages, turn the pages, snap again into a PDF.
- A script then parses all the images and OCRs them for the final PDF.
- You now own a backup of your DRM book, which you own forever. Pretty sure this is actually legal under DMCA since you are taking a backup of something you allegedly own. The encryption circumvention is irrelevant.
- now, break the law and throw the PDF on the internet to everyone. Go little bot! Go go go!
The encryption circumvention is irrelevant.
Oh you sweet summer child, judges will bend over backwards to slap people with multi-decade-to-life charges for ‘hacking,’ even if the ‘hacking’ is just the rightsholder accidentally presenting data to you.
To be fair, if you OCR the pages via camera, you haven’t actually circumvented DRM. That means it’s a completely legal backup, as the DRM on the original file was untouched and unaltered. This definitely does fall under fair use.
Theoretically, yes. Realistically, judges historically believe anything prosecutors tell them about hacking and circumvention.
There’s been people thrown in jail for the rest of their life for the crime of clicking a public URL that the company didn’t intend to be public.
There’s been people thrown in jail for the rest of their life for the crime of clicking a public URL that the company didn’t intend to be public.
Source?
The closest i’ve heard was a journalist being accused of hacking for the crime of choosing “view source” in the right-click menu of a web-browser.If you scroll down a bit, I actually already answered that question in this exact threat, one reply down.
In general I agree, but I am going to have to ask you for a source on that last one.
Looks like I mixed up two different cases- the cause of one, and the duration of another.
weev (who apparently is a giant asshole) was the one who got sent to jail for accessing a completely public URL AT&T wished he didn’t in 2010. The EFF took up his case. His sentence was later vacated by another court because so many civil rights lawyers kept joining his team pro-bono so the court tossed it out on a blatant technicality to get the issue to go away, so he only served ~2y.
As for the CFAA being used to slap people with life sentences, there’s too many examples to know which one I was mixing it up with. Aaron Swartz is the classic example.
so he only served ~2y.
Still 2y more than he should’ve, geez…
You didn’t circumvent it by breaking the encryption, but I’d say you still circumvented it.
Just do it in a country with reasonable laws
They already ruled on this in favor of allowing you to back up what you already own. See video games, DVDs and CDs, video tapes, this is well established already.
They actually walked that back using blu-rays as an excuse. If there’s any sort of DRM/encryption/etc, you’re completely unallowed to circumvent it, even for personal backup.
The goold old analog hole.
Switched to kobo.
It annoys me so much that they have convinced anyone that this stuff is for protecting against piracy of something like that, while this is just another tool for them to force you into using their platform and ecosystem. It does nothing against piracy.
Yeah you can easily pirate any book, or even just get them free at the library. This just fucks over the authors and people who want to buy their books legally. People don’t buy books because they have to, they want to.
Yep, I could pirate all my books and audio books if I wanted. All it would do is fuck over the author tho.
As much as I hate audible it’s the only legal choice I have for many of the books I listen to. Since basically every other legal option has out of the nearly 500 or so audio books I have less then 50 of them.
It’s annoying.
Books were among the first things to be pirated and are still among the easiest because the amount of data is so small. People we’re doing that on dial up Internet.
And to repurchase. Never forget that aspect of the scam. Sell but don’t actually sell, make the customer keep on paying.
I have five published books, all without drm. Amazon better not put that shit ON my books. It’s not there for a reason; I want people to share.
The real question is how can I find out what those 5 book are without you doxing yourself.
Curious, as someone who’s an actual author, do you have any legal option at all for preventing Amazon (which I assume technically act as your publisher in this case?) to put DRM on your books, or demand them to remove DRM if they added DRM without your notice?
Likely not, Amazon is a private market place and if their requirements to use it requires the drm his option is very likely use the drm or fuck off.
Not having good publicly controlled legal market places is one of the biggest failings of the internet.
But have you considered that Jeff needs another few billies?
Thank you!
again displaying, that DRM only hurts legitimate users. a pirate has never had the problem of backing up, moving or sharing his library…
I love Amazon.
Their website makes it so easy to look up books for Anna’s Archive.
It’s a great way to find the ISBN to chuck into annas or MaM
Anna’s Archive
Once they started mentioning stuff like this I sold my Kindle and got a moann. Its a little odd to use at times, but I love the size and the fact that I can just throw whatever book on there that I want. I use Anna’s archive for whatever book I’m looking for or go through my friend’s calibre library and I have over 200 books on my reader. I can also use libby with no issues. Its been fantastic breaking away from being stuck in the kindleverse.
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Why are people “buying” DRM infested books? They don’t own anything. “Their” books can be taken away at the whim of the seller. Their rights can change with a change to the EULA. There are other legal ways to use e-readers (not Kindles) that let you keep and back up what you buy.
Why are people doing X stupid thing that makes rich people richer at their own expense?
It’s the herding and conditioning. The sheeple have not woken up.
So many things make so much more sense when we realize this.
I bought a digital movie from Amazon prime in 2015. It fell off and they didnt give me a refund. The music I got from a burnt CD in 2004 is still on the C: drive of my current PC. I don’t think it pays to do the right thing in the long run.
🌏👩🚀🔫👩🚀
I mean, this is how you get me to stop buying Kindle books.
What do you mean buy kindle books
I stopped when they removed the “download and transfer via USB” option. Before that I bought books, downloaded a copy and removed the DRM.
Now I just download books without DRM for free.
