Stallman's Dystopia
blog.vivekhaldar.com
blog.vivekhaldar.com
Sure, discontinuities happen in extreme cases (e.g., the WTC's destruction -> the PATRIOT Act), and when they do a lot of people notice. The more subtle losses in freedom that occur gradually (the DMCA and its progeny, for example) are harder to notice until one day you look back and say "huh, how did we get here?"
The concept of the Overton Window [1] is interesting and germane here. 20 years ago the idea that you couldn't lend a book you own to your friend or loan them the new album you just bought would have seemed insane. Over time, a gradual shift in the concept of ownership has changed the scope of the issue to the point where many people would now accept that it seems reasonable that you can't lend your books to someone else.
People at the edge of the Overton window are like our canaries in the coal mine. Gradual shifts in the window are hard to notice from the middle, but easy to notice as the "edge" passes over you. In that respect, to me RMS seems most valuable to us for precisely the reasons others call him a crackpot.
Really? Some evidence for this claim would be very useful.
My (personal and anecdotal) experience is just the opposite - people seem more willing to lend out physical possessions - where they still have them. So, books, XBox games, clothes, etc - I see these things being shared all the time.
How many people are boycotting the Kindle because the lending feature is broken?
How fast would I get sued if I made a magical piece of software that allowed people to lend digital music purchases to their friends in some hypothetical way exactly analogous to lending them a physical CD (i.e., only one copy ever exists)?
How fast is the RIAA lawyering up over Amazon et al offering services where I can store my music in their cloud and stream it to myself?
Really, I don't think I'm making a hugely strong claim here.
Yesterday Amazon announced they're selling more titles on Kindle than hardback and paperback put together.
> How fast would I get sued if I made a magical piece of software that allowed people to lend digital music purchases to their friends in some hypothetical way exactly analogous to lending them a physical CD (i.e., only one copy ever exists)?
What does this have to do with me asking you for some evidence that people were more accepting of the fact that they can't lend books out?
> How fast is the RIAA lawyering up over Amazon et al offering services where I can store my music in their cloud and stream it to myself?
Again, not sure what this has to do with you saying people accept that it's reasonable to not lend out books.
I think we understand different things by "evidence" - you're positing hypotheticals.
[updated to add missing not in my penultimate sentence]
> Yesterday Amazon announced they're selling more titles on Kindle than hardback and paperback put together.
That's his point. Not many people are boycotting the Kindle, despite its titles being less lendable than their physical counterparts. This seems like evidence to me; it's not likely that you'll find a longitudinal study of people's attitudes towards book lending over the past 50 years, but anecdotally I think it's reasonable to posit that people would have scoffed at Kindle-like lending restrictions on physical books 50 years ago (and probably still would). What sort of evidence would you require?
Having said that, I clearly misunderstood his original point - I had physical items in mind when I responded.
There's an implication that we're all blissfully unaware, and one day we're going to wake up, and all the rights that matter will have been taken away from us, one imperceptible slice at a time. I pretty much disagree with this - I think the tradeoffs that are being made are deemed acceptable.
We yearn for more (the ability to share anything we want with anyone we want at any time), but we've have collectively decided to sacrifice some freedoms to gain others.
- freedom from physically needing to get to a bookstore - I know this sounds trivial, but there are many people who have difficulties with access
- the freedom of choice: I can still continue purchasing the physical artifacts and carry on as before
- being able to carry around hundreds or thousands of digital artifacts in incredible. I grew up with Walkmans, and having to create tapes, then moved onto carrying around CDs in cumbersome cases to go with my portable CDman.
Are these trivial freedoms? Possibly. Is my life better - certainly.
Steam makes my life super convenient, but what happens if I move to a country with super-aggressive bandwidth caps? For that matter, I don't even know if Steam would let me access my US-bought materials from another country.
As hackers, we're used to working around the problem. The problem is that that attitude lacks foresight, and "death by a thousand cuts" can become a reality.
Yes.
Dawn of war 2: Complete Pack (Australian Steam) $99.99 http://store.steampowered.com/app/56437/?cc=au
Dawn of war 2: Complete Pack (United States Steam) $59.99 http://store.steampowered.com/app/56437/?cc=us
Please note: The currency in both of these “products” is identical.
I like to rock climb on the weekends. Two of my favorite climbing destinations (I like them both for different reasons) have wildly different characteristics.
One is a top-roping area managed by the State Park Service and the management plan and local rock quality conspire to force you to utilize specific pre-planned routes. There are well-maintained trails and a parking lot up top. This is insanely convenient as you can just walk up, clip into anchors at the top of the crag, drop a rope, and you're in business. The convenience factor makes this a really great spot if you're taking out a group of inexperienced folks for their first time climbing. That's convenience.
The second area (in another state park) has no anchors of any kind. Parking is at the bottom a couple miles from the crag and to get to any of the climbs you're looking at a 45 minute hike uphill weighed down with a bunch of gear. The rock is also a lot taller here so toproping isn't an option, everything has to be lead from the ground up, on gear, with no pre-placed protection available. In non-climber terms this means you have to hang your ass out on the line and risk taking a fall on every climb you do there. You are totally free to pick any section of rock that suits your fancy, but this also means you have to be able to assess risk and know what you're about. That's freedom.
I thought you could do exactly that, if the author allows it, for something like 14 days. But there is a difference here: the author has the say on that (for now, anyway).
I won't be buying one until they remove the DRM.
EA's "Project Ten Dollar" is an attack at the used games market, and a side affect of this is that you can't lend the whole game to a friend.
All Steam games require you to have steam installed, and the physical CD is just a convenience. Once you've installed the game, you might as well throw the CD away.
people seem more willing to lend out physical possessions - where they still have them
Doesn't that bolster the original claim "many people would now accept that it seems reasonable that you can't lend your books to someone else."? As more and more media moves to digital distribution, the concept of lending is entirely foreign.
It's a pretty easy and painless gesture to lend someone a physical book for the weekend. It's a much harder gesture to lend someone your entire Kindle or iPad in order for them to access the book. Until/unless sharing features become more available, better known, and more widely used, I think we're really just seeing the effects of "I don't know how" rather than "I wouldn't."
The fact that they're not presumably indicates that people don't lend their books to their friends all that often.
I mean, I have hundreds of books, and I've lent a couple of 'em to friends on a couple of occasions, but if I were physically incapable of doing so then I doubt it would have bothered me too much.
Paper books vs eBooks are just different products with different properties. You can read and lend paper books and use 'em as paperweights and sell 'em second hand... but you can't copy 'em, and you can't fit more than a few in your carry-on luggage. eBooks, on the other hand, you can carry around hundreds at a time, but you can't sell or lend 'em or use 'em as paperweights.
And that's sad.
For the record, I am pro-sharing, and I believe that IP holders and media companies who would do their darndest to prevent sharing are incredibly short-sighted. They wring their hands about the need for (evidently magical) "viral marketing" of their material, while at the same time inherently limiting the ability of their consumers to do a lot of the peer-to-peer marketing that they used to do.
Lending a paper book meant you couldn't read the book until you retrieved it from the other party. Sharing an electronic copy has no such restriction.
Pretending that the rights you had with a paper book should be the same as the rights you have with electronic copy is silly because the only similarity is the content and nothing else. The real debate is what should your rights with regard to the content actually be? And how do you protect those rights when the content goes digital?
In letting these DRM schemes take hold and become commercially acceptable, I feel that as a profession, we have failed the general populace. (I am certainly not innocent here. Although I've not developed anything, I've bought quite a few DRM'd games.)
Only a few groups (such as the FSF) have stood up and tried to raise awareness of what's going on, but it's not been enough.
Observation: I don't think the FSF's tactic of renaming everything helped (iBad, iGroan, Treacherous Computing, Digital Restrictions Management, ...), as it adds another barrier to explaining things to Joe Public. I can see what they're trying to do (make these things sound less friendly), but for the nontechnical end user it just muddies the water.
iBad is tacky and groan-worthy, but I think Digital Restrictions Management is quite apropos.
Second, if consumers could buy books at 10% of the price on the condition that they not loan them to others, this is not a loss of freedom. It's a good deal.
Third, when you purchase a book, electronic or not, you are not purchasing the global distribution rights for the book. If that's what you want, it's available for a price I'm sure.
Fourth, I feel far more free to access books and information than I did before ebooks. My mother can loan me a book across the country without Fedex. For $10 (less than the price of Fedex'ing that book) I can permanently own a copy of that or nearly any book instantly, anywhere, anytime. I can carry all my books around with me all of the time. I call that freedom.
Fifth, let's not forget Amazon's library program! (http://content.usatoday.com/communities/technologylive/post/...)
This paranoia is completely unfounded and melodramatic. Take off your tin hats!
I recognise the problems in free distribution of digital goods, author compensations beeing the top one in my mind. But as someone already said, we tend to fix the problems with kludges rather than trying to come up with more long lasting solutions.
1. There is nothing stopping you from lending out your kindle.
2. The notion of "lending" doesn't really apply to electronic books. Absent copy protection, you can just give someone else a copy. With copy protection, to mimic "lending" some infrastructure needs to be in place to give someone else access rights to a copy of a book while simultaneously depriving you of your copy. And of course this is controlled by the seller, since they're the one putting the copy protection in place.
3. I can't copy/paste from my paper books either, at least not in any way that's not also available to kindle owners.
4. Every choice involves trade-offs. There is no morality involved here, much less the sound of jackboots. There is only what people value. Many seem to value the convenience of having their whole library in a small device over the ability to "lend" individual electronic copies. Those who feel differently can stick to paper books, or electronic books unencumbered by copy protection.
You mean I can chop the spine off of my kindle and run it through that massive scanning/OCRing beast like I did with textbooks? Awesome!
Sometimes comments like this makes me wonder whether or not it is not in our best interests not to let technology get hijacked by corporate interests. I understand Amazon has to make a profit somehow to continue providing the infrastructure, but if computers and technology have gotten us, humanity, to a point where one can "lend" books while simultaneously keeping our copy ourselves, why do we encumber ourselves? I can't imagine what people even 100 yrs ago would have wondered at such technology.
I am quite uneducated about history, but I can imagine a similar revolution with the printing press. How much of the clergy / priests opposed printing presses because they allowed the common masses to access information on a scale unprecedented at that time?
Edit: I realize upon a second reading the phrase "... technology get hijacked ..." might be hyperbole, but the point stands.
However, that leads me to another question: Must we always look at analogies from the past and work with them? The beauty of new technologies is that they're better than the old ones we had. It might take a lot more work, but it is much better to look at things afresh rather than falling back on old structures and status quo. The reason IP is so contentious is precisely because of this. We do not have anything to fall back on and must device probably completely new and arbitrary rules. Clearly it is in the publishers best interest to stick to status quo as much as possible and try to find analogies to old models so that it might be easier to justify a system in place that guarantees a revenue stream. But for the consumer, it is not obvious why this must be the case. In fact, the whole notion of publisher itself was a solution to a problem that technology has now (seemingly) solved.
You do realize that you as a creator are taking advantage of the medium to distribute your creation in much more efficient ways, yet, you don't want to give the privilege of the abilities of the medium to the consumer. It is this asymmetry that fundamentally perplexes me (to which I have no satisfactory answer).
One of the abilities of ebooks is that there is essentially zero duplication cost. That means that (outside of legal and DRM) there would be absolutely no reason for anyone to ever pay for a book instead of getting it for free.
I would actually say that there is very little advantage of ebooks to an author; piracy is suddenly an actual problem instead of something that would be laughable (how many pirate paper backs do people own?), people suddenly can't lose your book meaning they will only purchase it once, and most importantly you lose the entirety of the extra profits from hardcover editions (the price of hardcover versus paperbacks is not really from the cost to produce). Publishers are clearly going to be decimated by self publishing becoming more viable for up and coming authors.
The efficiency of not having to print actual books, ship them, etc is nothing compared to these other factors. The real reason why they have to sell ebooks is because customers are demanding them, and would buy their competitors books if they didn't offer digital editions.
Almost nothing about ebooks is actually positive to publishers or established authors. They are the horseshoe manufacturers and the model T has just been invented; just because they start making tires doesn't mean that they wouldn't be much happier if cars had never become invented.
Movable type was one of the causes and main tools of the Reformation and thus http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_wars_of_religion , so yes, there were huge consequences with lots of opposition.
It’s complicated, of course. The clergy was not always against the spread of books, and the wars had many causes. But comparing cheap digital copying with cheap printing is pretty safe from a historical perspective.
Every time I see a digital library service, where you can borrow a book or other media that then is deleted after certain lending period, I can't help but thinking that they are missing the point.
The time-limited lending period used by libraries is a bug. A bug that's solved by technology.
Libraries exist in order to spread knowledge and information. But they can't share their knowledge to everyone who wants it, they physically can't keep enough books or duplicate them in a timely manner. This bug has been fixed by digital technology, and we can duplicate them in a timely manner to anyone who wants it.
But some people insist on keeping the bug, and that they are doing society a favor.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/article/CA6649814.html?rssid=1...
[1]http://www.apple.com/legal/itunes/us/terms.html#SERVICE Under Intellectual Property
So, I do not think this would get struck down quickly. I do doubt that studios would dare sue in this case, though. Under pressure from public opinion, laws can change very quickly, and such a change could see studios lose quite a few sources of income.
http://www.copyrightservice.co.uk/copyright/p01_uk_copyright...
Restricted acts
It is an offence to perform any of the following acts
without the consent of the owner:
Copy the work.
Rent, lend or issue copies of the work to the public.
Perform, broadcast or show the work in public.
Adapt the work.
http://www.la-sofia.org/sofia/droit-de-pret-anglais.jsp
The payment per loan is 5.98 pI often think RMS is a bit of an extremist...but, when I really think things through, I often end up agreeing with him, at least on the core issues.
I've seen no evidence that the US has vastly superior public libraries to the UK: all UK cities have a large, comprehensive (non-lending) public library often built by Carnegie. Our local lending Libraries, however, are struggling here due to cuts in government funding - nothing to do with these copyright laws as far as I can tell.
5.9p per loan aggregated over millions of loaned books a year is a sizable chunk of change. Funding wouldn't need to be as large without those fees (which is why I suggested "all other things being equal. Of course all other things are not equal"). I'm just saying that without those fees, UK libraries would almost certainly be better. How much better? I dunno. Depends on how much the culture values libraries. US culture, despite having an anti-intellectualism bias in many areas, takes its libraries pretty darned seriously and tends to fund them reasonably well (though I'm sure more would be welcome, and many small towns don't have sufficient library resources), and most rights holders don't get to view libraries as a recurring revenue stream.
£7.6 million according to the article.
(interesting to note that as the U.S. is not a member of the PLR club, American authors will get none of it)
By comparison the British Library (the UK's biggest public library)'s budget is £142million.
Call me a commie if you wish, but I don't think this problem can be eliminated without rethinking capitalism as we know it, at least regarding "intellectual property". (This is arguably a self-healing problem, in that struggling entities will be forced to innovate new business models, as has been happening in the music space for the past 10 years.)
In the meantime, those who care deeply about these issues can {a} stick to real books, {b} pirate (note that you can pay and pirate if you like), and {c} keep yammering on about the issue with the hope of swaying more people to value their freedoms, thereby influencing the market.
Lady Gaga never had to exist in the first place. The fact that she does enriches some of our lives, but we must understand that content is a production of someone else's and it should be treated as such (just as we wish our users to respect the hard work we put into our web apps).
We are all public servants. To cooperate with each other we are, to that extent, serving each other. And we want to cooperate because when we do we gain.
We can cooperate enormously by sharing information/data. There is nothing in that that means we cannot pay people to produce it. Just that what has been produced is then best shared.
And the marvelous thing about information is that sharing it is free. It costs nothing to share it because copyability of info is infinite and abundant. We can all cooperate, and gain from it, yet no-one needs to give up anything at all.
Some people say we need to restrict information copying in order to make a market to pay for production. But that is nothing more than a pragmatic suggestion. It only makes sense to do that if we cannot devise some better arrangement that would fully realise the benefits of sharing data.
(Or in short, please wake up from all that Randroid casuistry and start seeing reality.)
The reality I prescribe to is that we all have the freedom to create content and share it under the terms we dictate. We do not have the freedom to dictate terms to someone else.
Where it does not violate essential freedoms (such as me letting someone use my Kindle, or listen to my iPod), having an ability to trust the terms you've set helps business prosper.
Like I said before, the public "culture" feature of this content seems to give us additional rights and ownership over it. Just because we really, really like Tron or Inception does not mean we have the rights to copy it and distribute it through bittorrent.
However, how do you propose content creators become incented to create content?
The basic approach of using "cyberspace" to impose this approach predates the popularity of the Internet. In fact, the popularity of the Internet postponed a lot of plans that were already on the agenda of various powerful forces.
http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Main_Page
They have a lot of good materials there if you are interested in older books.
You do need to be more careful with moisture and dropping damage than with a book. (Buy the warranty.) But if you get non-DRM content or remove the DRM, you can give a copy away, which I love.
I do still buy used books when the book is unavailable but in a few years I expect that will not often be the case.
Before the advent of the personal computer, computers cost as least as much as a small home. Arguably you could say the computers time was more valuable than the people using them, and people shared them in research and industrial labs.
Both items have become many orders of magnitude cheaper and plentiful to the point of commoditization. eBooks are still competing with hard copy works so the price differential isn't quite there. But once that industry capitulates look for them to drop significantly.
Personally I like the scenario where a friend recommends me a book for $2 that I can purchase for $2 myself vs. him paying $10 and letting me borrow. I like to pay for things that bring value to my life, and in a way he's subsidizing my usage.
The breakthrough e-book, Kindle, is similar. If you follow the brightly lit path, you'll start buying books. But there is a balance and users who want to avoid DRM content altogether are free to do so. Most of my news subscriptions are free of charge RSS and scrapes via the open source e-book manager Calibre.
The Kindle DRM, like all the e-book DRM out there, is weak and can be removed easily by readily available scripts. The current stream of commercially available e-books is being stripped of DRM and made available continuously.
So, the available readers are open for sharing.
E-books are tiny, mostly less than 2 MB uncompressed. It will always be easy to transfer lots of books quickly over any decent network link. Because the content is text, it is never going to become out of date and need to be re-ripped at a higher sampling rate. The analog hole, which is very real and relevant for all forms of media, is massive for books since the content can be OCR'ed or even retyped with relative ease.
So, current and future e-books are not protected effectively against copying.
I don't think the no-book-lending scenario has any chance of happening.
But first, the free market will have to dismantle the government protections that enforce monopoly rights for authors. That will only happen when we find a better system. Subscriptions may be that system.
http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/109.html
Kindle rules on lending things:
https://kdp.amazon.com/self-publishing/help?topicId=A2JGI9S4...
Why is there no way for me to give something I bought to my friend, digital or not? We have a digital currency now that claims that I cannot both send you money and keep it at the same time. Why isn't this possible with my mp3s, ebooks and movies?
1) You can lend your Kindle out all you want and let people read your books, just as you could before. You just can't duplicate the book onto someone else's Kindle or in any other way, just as you couldn't before. This is a reasonable restriction and not any worse than it was with a physical book, which you are also prohibited from scanning, photocopying and distributing outside of fair use.
2) You can not copy/paste a physical book either. I agree that this should be allowed, but it's not a dystopian future - there is no loss over physical books here, only gain.
Perhaps Amazon should allow some sort of way to help with "fair use" citations, and maybe they should remove restrictions on public domain material. On the latter though, those are generally available for free from many sources, so the fact that you can't copy/paste on your Kindle is an inconvenience, not a dystopia.
Only until that becomes a violation of Amazon's TOS, or reading your books requires you be 'authenticated' with a rights server.
These things happen in steps and just because it works now does not imply that is will continue to work next week/month/year.
A. Purchase a streaming 'membership' where you only have the right to personally stream music from a remote server
B. Purchase encrypted, non-transferrable 'tracks' which will become unplayable when the company supplying them stops running their servers.
There are still avenues (Amazon mp3) which do not take this approach (DRM), but you still cannot legally resell the goods you purchased.
Anyhow, it seems strange that you feel like you have a right to something produced by someone else. I'm not sure they should be able to make laws making circumvention illegal. But, aren't you complaining because you can't access someone else's work in a manner that you think is convenient?
The whole "our rights are being squashed because I can't share my ebook with you" argument reeks a little too much of entitlement for me to get behind it.
The fundamental is that technological advance has given us something good, that we did not have before, for free. The sensible question is, how can we best benefit from it.
Are we entitled to the invention of the car? Are we entitled to comfortably travel at faster than walking pace? The question seems meaningless, let alone unhelpful.
Aamazon built the kindle. It is their to decide what to do with it. You and I have no right to usurp their product because we want to alter the benefit. If you don't like the DRM or the features, don't use the product, or start a competitor to the Kindle.
Please don't expand my comment to any other industries. There are certain safety and utility businesses that require regulation. I don't think being able to electronically download a book over a propriety network using a proprietary device (that someone chose to purchase) is one of those.
Education, water, electricity, communication, and healthcare are all fine and proper examples of what happens when incumbents reach "escape velocity" and their past innovations turn into today's rent seeking.
Are you "entitled" to lend a paper book to someone. Publisher say no, and they are backed up with the force of law in some countries.
Are you "entitled" to read a book out loud? The Authors Guild says no.
Are you "entitled" to sing a song out loud? ASCAP says no.
Are you "entitled" to sell a CD that you own? Music publishers say no.
Eventually I'll might get to something to which you do think you are "entitled", and smart money bets there is someone in the content industry who wants to deprive you of it, and someone in the legislature willing to make you a criminal if you if you try. The slippery slpe has been well documented for a long time.
BTW, if you haven't already recognized it, this discussion is about much more than just Amazon's TOS.
Now, I get the bonus of being able to buy just one track.
I would say the people's will is doing nicely in the music industry, even given how hard the RIAA has fought it. I suspect books will follow as people determine what the new norms are and companies find a way to flourish or die therein.
For the longest time it was impossible to buy any (mainstream) music without DRM from anywhere online. This is no longer true. New services (like Amazon MP3) now sell music without DRM and old services (like iTunes) also switched over to selling music without DRM.
Music is the clearest example that this issue is quite a bit more complicated and that working towards more freedom is possible, has already worked and might work again in the future.
(By the way, the labels also tried to bring DRM to CDs for quite some time. I think they stopped doing that, too. I’m not so sure because I didn’t buy any new music on CD ever since I could buy all the un-DRMed music I wanted online.)
In short, I'll just say this:
* "media companies" is an unnecessarily broad category. But saying "books' rights owners" would invalidate your entire point. Now, you could have pointed out that the MPAA and RIAA felt they had no choice but to lock things down and "attack". Then you could have pointed out the similarity in contexts between their situation and the books' rights groups. Then it would have been reasonable (although a huge stretch, IMO) to suggest that the books' rights groups may make similar decisions. But you chose not to, which leads me to my next two points:
* you cannot prove a negative (this is a big one, so you might want to re-read it)
* your tone is overly emotional and inflammatory, something that at once weakens your points and makes me not like you very much
I don't see why people would expect a business to be run in a method that yields no tangible benefits (why does amazon or penguin want you to share books?), but could have consequences (reduced sales).
Sometimes it seems like people are shocked when companies act in their best interests. It's very strange.
And that maybe we should care.
If people are willing to give up their right to loan books in exchange for the convenience of eBooks, it sounds more like an exchange of freedom for convenience. But that's a choice people make, which is something I can't get too worked up over.
I also don't buy an argument that paper books are going away any time soon. There are huge swaths of people 40-and-up who will never read ebooks (and I suspect that is the demographic that reads more "books" than the younger set)
Not per se. But it is withdrawal of extra freedoms/features that electronic media and the internet provide e.g. nearly-free copying and distribution and random access.
There are many possible (and legal) applications that are made impossible, even for the buyer of a book. Think e.g. of corpus linguistics, applications for automatic annotation of phrases, etc.
The media companies are trying to turn what is new and provides enormous potential benefits to the population into what is old, because it is easier to stay with old business methods than to reinvent yourself.
This just means that these attributes (sharing, copying, etc.) are not something inherent to the medium. While I agree that these restrictions can prevent cool features from being enabled, it's a stretch for me to believe I'm entitled to those features.
It also sounds like you're projecting a little onto the media companies with your last paragraph. Isn't it just as reasonable that they are clinging to old business methods because the new ones may cause their non-existence? In that sense, they are acting in rational self preservation.
They are precisely inherent to any digital medium.
That's what some find so galling. Part of the point being made here is that you need to resort to cumbersome kludges to prevent people from enjoying the opportunities that are already enabled by the medium.
For the content you want, there may one day be no alternative, but I find it unlikely. The trend through all of RMS's posturing and windbagging has been more and more free exchange of information than there ever has been.
I understand what you're saying, but I feel like I should point out that there is a very large corpus of ebooks available that are not customer-hostile. (feedbooks.com, pragprog and oreilly, etc.) In fact, the Kindle hardware works great with them. It's only content purchased from Amazon which is objectionable.
You are a human with free will. You can choose to do whatever you think is ethical and rational. If you think it's ethical to give books to other people, and you aren't going to suffer for it, then why aren't you doing it? I think it's really weird that we can sit here on Hacker News and talk about these arbitrary restrictions that Amazon has made as if they are actually restricting something. They are restrictions in name only.
2) you are comparing "copying" text from a sheet of paper to an electronic device. that doesn't make any sense at all. people who view text on an electronic screen are used to being able to select and copy it. that was never possible, nor will it ever be with a physical paper book.
Now that I've played devil's advocate, I'm not a big fan of the technological measures that attempt to prevent piracy. I believe that the solution is pricing digital media so that it's more 'disposable' - that is, price it so cheaply that pirating and even lending is too much trouble.
Piracy hasn't slowed down.
Like you say though, likely a moot point.
Folks, this is not an Orwellian conspiracy, but rather a limitation of matter and energy which is a consequence of the tradeoffs we make when we decide to use an ereader and put all our books in one device.
If there were a law preventing you from copying the text, now that would be a problem. But there is no such law as far as I know. In fact, I live in a country where, so far, such copying of any book is expressly authorised as long as it is for private use.
As for the kindle, I don't understand which of its function couldn't be performed just as well by a small laptop, but I barely know what it looks like, so I may be wrong.
At least that's what it does for me. I am careful to only buy books that I am okay with not reading multiple times (ie, if Amazon yanks them or Amazon itself dies), though.
The principle selling point of the Kindle is that you can read for days on end without hurting your eyes. Laptop screens tend to hurt people's eyes a lot when used for reading many hours at a time. It's also smaller, lighter, more convenient and far cheaper than any laptop.
> but I barely know what it looks like, so I may be wrong.
You're being downvoted because you're talking about things you know nothing about - things that take < 5 seconds to find out. Please do some research before taking time to bash products or complain on HN.