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Comment by Spivak | Hacker News Reader

I don’t think there’s questionable legality of stripping DRM to read books you have a license to on your own device.

AFAIK, It's not questionable, there is no gray area. On the US it's a crime, almost everywhere else it's perfectly legal.

You’re right. It’s in the realm of not paying sales tax on stuff you buy out of state. No one keeps track of that shit but also it’s illegal to not do that.

I actually did do that until e-tailers started collecting state taxes.

It was very frustrating, from a civics perspective, to have to choose between obeying democratically enacted laws or being a chump.

As of a couple years ago, my state (Maine) added an option to calculate out-of-state taxes as a percentage of your income instead of tracking.

Wasn't DeCSS held legal in the US for purposes of playing back DVDs you've purchased? Shouldn't consuming e-books fall under the same ruling?

If I remember it correctly, CSS was deemed too weak for being considered copy protection. But I'm far from an expert. I'm not even from the US.

Actually, from skimming the linked white paper: https://www.eff.org/wp/unintended-consequences-16-years-unde...

It looks like there's no way to watch DVDs legally with FOSS (still) in the US?

On the other hand the precedent for ebooks seem a bit better?

https://www.eff.org/es/press/archives/2008/04/21

No, it wasn't held legal. You can't play commercial dvds, blurays, etc. on vanilla fedora.

The only two places I know that haven’t criminalised the circumvention of technical protection measures are Israel and Afghanistan. I’d love to be told different.

(I feel there’s still an opportunity to challenge DMCA 1201 in the US, and then there’s also the triennial review. It’s harder in places where the exemptions are hard-coded — but maybe you know of one that includes an exemption for this kind of DRM removal?).

It’s not quite as bad as that: according to the IIPA, “Brazil, Egypt, Israel, Norway, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Thailand and Vietnam, as well as smaller markets, such as Bolivia, Brunei, Kenya, Kuwait, Lebanon, Namibia, Tanzania and Uganda” haven’t implemented it.

At least in terms of law as it's applied it's definitely not true. Either your sources are not correct, or "circumvention" is described very differently in other places.

Its explicitly legal to do this in New Zealand, for the purpose of shifting formats.

There may not be, but it's a pain in the ass. To strip Kindle books, you need to use an outdated Kindle PC client that uses an old encryption and may or may not break at any point in time, stop it from updating, track down some shifty plugin for Calibre that handles like a house of cards, etc.

Years ago, yeah. It took some time to figure out the new .kfx format. Now? If you're on a macOS/Windows no setup is necessary, provided you have the Kindle app installed. If you have a physical Kindle and you use Linux, the setup is as easy as looking up a serial number in settings and entering it into the plugin's settings. If you don't have a physical one and no access to a Windows machine, then it is a bit tricky, yeah. That said, I assume this doesn't apply to at least 70% of its users.

As for the plugin's stability, I have yet to experience a problem after like 7-8 years of usage. I've upgraded from Calibre v4 to v5 before the plugin supported v5, but that's about it.

Appropriate any pointers, as I want to copy and paste from an book on the Kindle ended up camera photo to ocr. I am on Linux (Debian) and struggle to complete this task. Either I am not good a google or need to re-try.

You don't think that; publishers however think differently. If you think it's user-hostile, they think it's right way.

Well, the publishers aren't entitled to enter my house and check.

If bits and bytes enter my home I can do anything I want with them within that private property.

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