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I don't think victim-blaming is a great way to educate people on the existence and dangers of DRM. Convenience might even be worth it to some people, but I think it's more often a problem of ignorance. Any TV ad for a Kindle is going to focus on the broad selection and ease of use. Telling those people about the DRM isn't participating in the same conversation that sold them the device.

On the other hand, I dont think victim-blaming is an excuse for rampant and continuous ignorance either. At some point, after getting abused again and again, users are to blame. All this shouldn't suprise any of them, it's in the ToS after all. Some users read the ToS and made an educated choice, some didn't read them and decided to not participate in any business with a company that obfuscates its goals in a 50-page wall of legal damage control, and some just ignore it and use the service. The ones that ignore the ToS and that get caught by suprise later are absolutely to blame for their own neglectance of the contract conditions.

You cannot avoid the TOS. They are all designed to protect the seller not the buyer. On top of that, you -as a single consumer- has no choice to select parts of the TOS. It's a unilateral-contract by definition.

You, as a comsumer, always have the right to not accept the ToS and take your money elsewhere. Amazon fortunately doesn't have a monopoly on the ebook market.

What store sells ebooks legally and doesn't have similar ToS?

I usually go to the publishers or, if self published, authors website directly and buy from there. Books are distributed as epub that I can load on my ereader calibre alike.

You keep saying this, but you leave out the fact that not that many publishers sell direct, and most popular books are not available in this manner.

So yes this works _sometimes_, but not most of the time.

For the majority of users who are looking for a very specific book, not just _any_ new book to read, buying it digitally means buying it from a DRM-laden marketplace.

Amazon is also a publisher. Many books I’ve read have been self-published by authors via Amazon’s system.

Any of them that sell DRM-free ebooks would work.

Of course, they have a much smaller selection than Amazon and you likely won't find the book you want. So it's not really a proper alternative. You either accept their TOS or you don't get to read the book you want digitally.

There is nowhere you can take your money that doesn't force you to accept the same abusive terms of service. They all pay lawyers to write this stuff and they all come up with the same self-serving clauses. Once you've read one of these documents, you've pretty much read them all.

What they say is basically:

> you have no rights

> you promise not to try and exercise any right you think you have

> you will not do anything the company doesn't like

> the company can do anything whether you like it or not

> the company is not responsible for anything ever

> we make no guarantees about anything

At one point in time, One-Way non-negotiable contracts where unenforceable and considered coercive. I wonder when / why that changed when we added "on the internet" an called it is "Terms of Service"

Why is easy - because corporations love them. As for the “how”, that’s also pretty simple. Enough money applied to lawyers who argue for the corporation’s side in contract disputes, enough to set precedent.

All this shouldn't suprise any of them, it's in the ToS after all.

This is an extremely weak argument, IMHO.

For a start, it's clearly impractical for the average person to even read all of the legal documents they theoretically agree to. It would take an absurd amount of time and have a devastating effect on our quality of life and the productivity of our society.

Even that assumes the reader would be qualified to understand the legal implications of a long, often complicated document, possibly written according to the laws of another country, in the first place. This again seems extremely optimistic, given that professional lawyers spend years studying their own legal systems and are then often very well paid for sharing the expertise they have acquired.

So the idea that burying something unfair or unreasonable in a ToS document that realistically almost no-one is going to read and properly understand is really just a conceit of the legal profession (and possibly not even that, since even lawyers understand the fiction that is happening here).

The essence of any legal contract is an agreement, understood and entered into voluntarily by all parties involved, that exchanges things of value to the parties. Different legal systems might use slightly different words to say that, but they mean much the same thing. Hiding shady stuff in the small print of an agreement written by one side's professional lawyers and probably never even read never mind understood by the other side is far from sufficient to meet that standard for a legal contract.

This is why good businesses and their lawyers go out of their way to present the key details of any agreement clearly and up-front, not to hide them on page 91. It's also why courts hearing consumer rights cases sometimes side with the consumer even if something else was stated in a ToS or similar document.

If people don't know I guess I agree, though with the question of: should they have known? If people do know but choose not to consider what may happen, they had that education you mention but disregarded it. I can't feel too sorry for them.

> I don't think victim-blaming is a great way to educate people

What would be a better way, specifically?

If you try to point out all this to someone, the usual response is that they don't care, it doesn't happen to them. I have been trying this since Steams first versions and more or less gave up by now. People value convenience above all else.

Oh yes. I've had those conversations myself.

That, or "people" make their own educated decisions about the trade-offs they are accepting, and those may be different - yet equally valid - from your own decisions.

True. How often that careful measuring occurs would be interesting to know. Except for some people on here on HN I can't think of any personal acquaintances who do it that way.

The fool me once discussion is always relevant. What is new is the fact that consumer stupidity takes everyone down as well. Without that we wouldn't suffer through this cloud hell.

Lots of people aren't victims, they choose to remain ignorant after being warned. Often they don't take the warnings seriously and even insult the person who was just trying to help. They absolutely deserve to be blamed for the results of their choices.

Lots of people aren't victims, they choose to remain ignorant after being warned.

What makes you think that? It seems highly unlikely to me that the average customer of an ebook reader or a streaming TV/movie service or one of the gaming networks has any idea about how the DRM works or how intrusively the provider of their electronic content can later monitor their use of it and change or revoke their access to it. Who do you think is going around and warning all these people, in such a way that they can reasonably understand the implications of what is being said, about the risks that come with these kinds of technologies?

Now, if you were arguing that governments should be regulating these industries, mandating information for customers about the risks and prohibiting abusive behaviours by content providers, then I'd be the first to agree with you. I think such measures are long overdue. But that's not the same thing as what you wrote before.

Yeah, but all those things only happen to the other guy. It can’t happen to me. It’s like trying to explain to people why they should care about privacy on the Internet. They can’t see themselves in that position, ever.

> What makes you think that?

I used to tell people and most of them ignored what I said.

> It seems highly unlikely to me that the average customer of an ebook reader or a streaming TV/movie service or one of the gaming networks has any idea about how the DRM works

They don't have to understand technical details. They just have to understand one fact: they don't actually own what they're spending their money on.

I told them, they understood and they didn't care.

> Who do you think is going around and warning all these people, in such a way that they can reasonably understand the implications of what is being said, about the risks that come with these kinds of technologies?

Me. I used to tell everyone I know. It was useless.

> Now, if you were arguing that governments should be regulating these industries, mandating information for customers about the risks and prohibiting abusive behaviours by content providers, then I'd be the first to agree with you.

Don't get me wrong. I generally agree with this. Actually I have a radical opinion: copyright should be abolished and it should be illegal to implement DRM in any form.

This doesn't change the fact that these people cannot be helped. They want their pleasure and if you're pointing out issues you're just getting in their way. They absolutely deserve to be blamed if their accounts get banned and they lose everything.

Have you considered that the people you told don't really believe you are as expert as you claim, or believe that you were overdramatizing the situation?

> They just have to understand one fact: they don't actually own what they're spending their money on.

The consequences of losing access don't necessarily follow from that though. Lots of people for example understand the principle of leasing an apartment or car, and in those cases it's much harder for the true owner to arbitrarily take the property away from you.

> Actually I have a radical opinion: copyright should be abolished and it should be illegal to implement DRM in any form.

Radical opinions further tell people that you are not being pragmatic about what you are saying and therefore it can't be very practical advice. That is another reason why I expect people weren't receptive to your warnings.

> Have you considered that the people you told don't really believe you are as expert as you claim, or believe that you were overdramatizing the situation?

I don't claim to be an expert. I'm just a guy who cares a lot about this stuff. I suppose I can be dramatic but I don't think that makes me wrong.

> The consequences of losing access don't necessarily follow from that though.

Currently, they do. That could change in the future but right now when people spend money on media they're merely buying some company's permission to enjoy some content. That permission can be revoked at any time and for any reason or no reason.

> Lots of people for example understand the principle of leasing an apartment or car, and in those cases it's much harder for the true owner to arbitrarily take the property away from you.

People aren't leasing content though. They're buying it. They buy books, they buy video games...

> it can't be very practical advice

Ignoring copyright is actually the most practical advice there is.

Everybody understands how to do it. I've yet to meet a single person who has never infringed copyright. People do it without even realizing it. It's how people naturally operate, especially on the internet. When people want something, they right click on it and save it. Nobody really thinks about the creator's rights to monopolize imaginary property.

The only problem with this advice is it's technically illegal. We can fix this by abolishing copyright.

> Currently, they do. That could change in the future but right now when people spend money on media they're merely buying some company's permission to enjoy some content. That permission can be revoked at any time and for any reason or no reason.

I think you are misunderstanding my point.

What I am saying is that most people's expectation of leasing/renting arrangements is such that there are protections in place to prevent the thing from being arbitrarily taken away.

However those protections don't exist for software services, only physical things like cars and apartments. Thus it is a violation of peoples' expectations that software services don't have those protections.

So it is not enough to simply tell them, "You don't own it and that's the problem". That does not fully explain the problem. In order to fully explain the problem you would need to explain how not only do you not own it, but ALSO there are no legal protections to prevent it from arbitrarily being taken away like a layperson might expect there to be such a situation.

> People aren't leasing content though. They're buying it. They buy books, they buy video games...

Earlier you just said that users don't own the content... so which is it?

> I buy all my books directly from the publisher, drm-free

Most publishers don't do that. Why do you think Amazon has DRM? It's not because they enjoy running DRM schemes, they were among the first to sell straight MP3s even. It's because most publishers love DRM. See also the lawsuit against Internet Archive at the first whiff of creaks in the DRM dam.

As I replied to the sister comment, I might be biased because I love science fiction and most science fiction authors are probably somewhat aware what drm is and pick a publisher that fits them not only from a financial standpoint but also the ethical one. This whole comment might've looked different if I'd be a fan of historical fiction, but I don't really feel like finding out.

> It's not because they enjoy running DRM schemes

They sure do enjoy the lock-in that results from publishers demanding DRM.

Books feel like they are in a special class of digital good and I think most people would support legislation ending the use of permanent, proprietary digital locks on books.

> It's not like they haven't been warned that this would happen.

Not only have they not been warned, services like Audible and Kindle are actively marketed to hide that possibility.

If they really wanted people to understand that these purchases can be revoked at any time, they'd stop using words like "own", "buy", and "my library".

It's fine to hold consumers responsible, but only if companies are transparent. "Buy" is a word with a specific definition in the physical world, and Amazon is abusing that understanding.

Pretty sure the fact that they use words like "own", "buy" and "my library" everywhere except the fine print could be used against them in court to argue that they really did "sell" a book and you indeed "own" it, despite what they put in some fine-print.

Good luck against Amazon's lawyer army.

I stopped buying music on amazon the day their stupid website told me my browser is too dumb to download the MP3 files and I should get chrome instead (using an up to date vivaldi, based on chromium, at most a month or so behind chrome in its feature-set).

It's their right to try ripping me off, but it's disgusting that they don't communicate this. You click "buy now", but somewhere in the small print it says "oh but you're not really buying buying it though". That should be illegal. In fact, pretty sure it is illegal.

Chances are, if someone wanted to spend the thousands if not millions of dollars/euros/pesos/whatever to actually take legal action to demand the content they paid for, it's not unlikely that the decision would fall along the lines of "You can't just effectively sell something and claim you didn't really sell it"

It's like the "It's not monetization I swear, they're just donating and we're giving them something back to show our gratitude" bullshit people pull with Arma 3 servers. Everyone sees through it, but it works as long as nobody has a real interest in actually stopping it.

I noticed that they disabled downloading on mobile as well, when I open a link from amazon to download the music I just bought they told me to download their stupid app and and export from that to my filesystem. After setting it up there was no option to export, so I forced the desktop site with firefox and could download after clicking through two dialouges that tried to convince me that downloading is _really_ not what I want to do. Never bought any media on amazon again after that.

Interesting.. how often can you find the publisher offering a drm free copy? I buy _a lot_ of books (usually one or two per week), and I have a feeling I’d only find 1 in 5 from a publisher but haven’t checked. Also, I always do the “try a sample” first which has saved me a lot of money from buying books that weren’t what I expected. Wish there was an equivalent to that!

I think all book I read in the last three years I bought without drm applied to the files. Most of them have some kind of invisible watermark I couldn't care less about that presumable helps the publisher track down who distributed a book if the user didn't remove it, but it being invisible and probably bit-sized, that's an okay thing in my book (heh).

Now that I think of it, it might have to do with the fact that I read sci-fi almost exclusively, where the authors have some kind of political interest in freedom themselfes and might pick publishers accordingly, but I have no way to back that idea up. The majority of the books I bought are published by Bastei Lübbe (https://www.luebbe.de/), but smaller publishers usually allowed me to do the same.

I don't read book samples because I check the reviews for books I plan on reading on whereever I can find them, but I might start if the reviews start failing me. Might have to figure out where those are possible then :)

> how could amazon _do this to me_?

This is the main complain IMHO.

Most people trust amazon to be around in 10 years, and do not mind to be bound to a specific company. It would be fine if there was a recourse when getting kicked out of the platform.

This is similar to mail data on gmail, people are aware of the limitations, but are still pissed off when Google shuts down their account without any explanation.

Your point about DRM-free is another form of having a way out of the platform in case of dispute, but there could be other solutions as well I guess.

Yes, I also try to get it directly from the publisher. This has the advantage, that often you get the much better quality PDF version than the Amazon version with garbled math in it. I have bought maybe 5 books for Kindle that I couldn't get any other way. It sucks, because I cannot make these 5 books part of my Calibre library.

> It sucks, because I cannot make these 5 books part of my Calibre library.

Depending on a range of factors, this might be useful for solving that:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24685279

Yeah, I've tried it once, but I couldn't get it to work quickly. Easier to just not buy books for Kindle.

I use this and it works beautifully. I never even load onto my kindle, which is sitting in a draw somewhere. Remove DRM, convert to epub and read in iBooks.

Blame structures, intentional structures, not people. People are just buying books the way books are sold. They can go elsewhere is not a reasonable response in amazon's case, considering the % of digital book market do they own?

It's reasonable for the average person to expect stuff to be reaspnable.