User's Kindle eBook collection revoked by Amazon (2012)
bekkelund.net
bekkelund.net
I truly wish the Kindle had more competition.
But I am also surprised to learn that some software-only features are not included in updates to older devices. I have a Kobo Glo, and despite having finished an update less than fifteen minutes ago I don’t have the Dropbox syncing feature.
https://help.kobo.com/hc/en-us/articles/360033830114-Add-boo...
Considering everyone got their money, it's unethical to have any DRM on the book at that point.
Edit: personally, I don't like to be told how I should compute so I reserve the right to do what I want with bits (state of my sillicon) I have. Regarding IP of the content: I make sure not to distribute things I'm not licensed to distribute.
Your's is a fair statement of our state of affairs. All these content distributors rely on increasingly complex models of distributions that rely on people's lack of willingness (or ability) to comprehend what they are buying.
> Upon your download or access of Kindle Content and payment of any applicable fees (including applicable taxes), the Content Provider grants you a non-exclusive right to view, use, and display such Kindle Content an unlimited number of times (for Subscription Content, only as long as you remain an active member of the underlying membership or subscription program), solely through a Kindle Application or as otherwise permitted as part of the Service, solely on the number of Supported Devices specified in the Kindle Store, and solely for your personal, non-commercial use. Kindle Content is licensed, not sold, to you by the Content Provider.
It's clickwrapped, of course. No doubt the argument would be that, whether you read this or not, you agreed to it as a legally binding contract when you "bought" a Kindle book.
I'd like to see it really tested in court, but I don't expect to. For that to happen would probably take a very high incidence of people's accounts and/or access to paid content being revoked for no reason, and as far as I know that doesn't happen anywhere near often enough to make it an issue under public consideration - not that it's other than wrong either way, but I would be surprised to see Amazon legal permit a tactical blunder that would risk the company being hauled into court and forced to behave as if they thought their customers deserved fair consideration.
The latest format is to my knowledge currently unbroken - even with suitable plugins. So only way around is to get an old kindle which doesn’t support the new encryption and thus falls back on the old encryption
At the end of the day, as long as the decryption is protected by a key that is held somewhere on the Kindle device, hackers will find a way of exposing that key.
If you want to go the dedrm way It has been answered a little further down the thread:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24272631
Edit: link to the dedrm post.
And you should have that. As for the rest of us out here, we should have the option to back our books up.
I'm really not comfortable that my license of reading could be revoked. Or if the company somehow died, or if the kindle program is terminated, or if the relationships with the publisher deteriorate, my content will vanish.
I gained this anxiety when Netflix pulled away "House M.D.", which I binged watched until just before Season 8. Life became busy and I had to stop. When I came back, eagerly wanting to watch the last season, it was already gone from the catalogue.
TV shows, I can forego; book collections I cannot.
When one day I no longer reside in a small apartment, I'll probably go back to buying physical copies.
To be clear Netflix didn't pull House, NBC Universal pulled it from Netflix and sold it to Amazon Prime. It's likely it will get pulled from Amazon Prime and end up on Peacock.
Being able to read on my phone or a featherlight e-reader is absolutely fantastic. Before that, easily more than half of my vacation luggage was books. I don't need to lug around a tome everywhere just so I can read on the subway. That's worth a lot to me.
One of my dream is to have a old-school style study, with no computer, some giant book shelves and a music stand.
[0]: https://www.howtogeek.com/162994/how-to-strip-the-drm-from-y...
[1]: https://apprenticealf.wordpress.com/2012/09/10/drm-removal-t...
None of this by itself is promotion of piracy as far as I'm concerned, since we're just talking about gaining full control of the things we DID buy and paid for from Amazon, so I refuse to consider it "wrong" despite their tiresome efforts at DRM lock-in.
https://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/calibre-kfx-drm-guide.ht...
Well no, it's not. You're purchasing a license to consume the content, conditional on the terms of the license. What gives you the impression you're buying the book?
If amazon really wanted the customer to understand the fine-print, they could force that. They don't, so why should customers care?
Especially those multiplayer-only games, that ultimately will vanish and a piece of gaming history becomes lost to time.
Even if we have mostly given up on the more general "right of first sale" and "first sale doctrine" on digital goods (that we can resell purchases as "used"), survivorship should not be forgotten.
Maybe one day there’ll be alternatives, you’ll be able to buy and own books and read them on devices like the Open Book:
https://itsfoss.com/open-book/
In the meantime I’ll be sticking with old paper books.
On the downside they take up a lot of space (but I guess that’s why we have public libraries, charity shops and second hand book shops.)
On the upside they have a great battery life.
https://pocketbook.cz/cs-cz/catalog/color-screen-cz/pocketbo...
I buy Kindle books all the time, and would love to see this decided in court...
Basically any book can be gotten from libgen. I usually buy books from living authors, then let those live in the cloud as a backup. I get the pirated version for personal use. If the author isn't living anymore then I don't buy it at all.
I wonder what the reaction would be if it said, "Lease Now!" instead?
It is an important point that you do not own the actual book file, but the right to read it, which is fragile.
I don't feel like investing my money without extracting the book files.
no one should feel guilty about stripping DRM from things they rightfully paid for.
I say Amazon, but just as easily it could have been Google, or Apple, or any other similar vendors of digital goods. There are enough horror stories out there.
I'm still appreciative of all those folks working in the shadow to break those protections and provide a DRM-free version, even if it's illegitimate.
What do you mean? The victim provided every detail (and in fact, she later got her account restored, no apologies or explanations given -- again). All details missing are by Amazon, which is precisely the problem: the company can terminate your account and delete the items you bought while providing absolutely no information whatsoever.
It's as if a brick & mortar book store reserved the right to enter your house and take back a book you bought, without explaining everything besides "you broke a rule".
The glitch in their fraud detection system is not the biggest issue; glitches happen. Their total lack of transparency and explanations is the problem.