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Comment by imtyler | Hacker News Reader

I assume this violates the EULA of most retailers and subjects your account to possible deletion. Not saying that it's likely, but DRM restrictions seem like a matter of principle to some people. Even if you can strip the DRM you still don't legally own the product.

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And if they ask about it, you simply lie, but they'll never ask. I get your theoretical concern, but I don't understand what practical the concern is, because there doesn't seem to be one. They can't peer into your hard drive or running processes, and they aren't going to track down the accounts of random internet commenters.

First, fuck those retailers for putting such conditions on things you bought to own. They're yours, so who cares.

Second, strip the DRM using Calibre, and store the books off any cloud-based platform and on your own drives, as you always should in any case given the proclivity of many content companies to just flagrantly bullshit their way into excusing themselves when they frequently steal back their customers access to stuff they ostensibly own.

Once a piece of digital content is actually yours, in your own device drives, it's only then really yours.

Keep the on-device cloud-based versions around if you like the user interface of your platform or reader, but your own digital copies elsewhere. The retailer doesn't even need to know (though I personally wouldn't give a tin shit if they did anyhow).

>"They're yours..."

Yes and no. There's an important distinction between _having_ something and _owning_ something. You can have possession of figures carved from contraband elephant ivory. But if anyone who was inclined to care about such things decided to take action, a court could compel you to destroy it. Same thing with any illegal item.

But these are all "ifs and buts." Hence why it's a matter of principle and not practice. At the end of the day, most people are fine with "buying" a book that they don't own as evidenced by the sales.

Now you're just engaging in silly semantics. Yes, in all practical sense, you absolutely do own the DRM-free books you've stripped of their rent-seeking garbage. You could even take that to court and quite heavily argue that because you bought them as claimed property, they're yours. You might not win, but a case could be made and in any case, you could move digital copies anywhere you want. The ones doing wrong here are the companies that try to impose DRM on things people are buying under a notion of ownership, That these also randomly erase or reclaim things they claim to have sold only makes the wrong worse.

>At the end of the day, most people are fine with "buying" a book that they don't own as evidenced by the sales.

most people are under the impression that they own the things they've paid for, and the inevitable rug pulls always take them by surprise.

rejecting the bullshit rules of rent-seeking parasites would be a more worthy principle to pursuit.

Nobody can compel you to destroy a DRM-free digital copy AND enforce this. It is impossible.

If it's not enforced or not enforceable, there is no "compel".

EULAs aren't worth the pixels they are printed on. All EULAs can be ignored until there is an established precedent ruled on by courts.

Except that, once there is an established precedent, it's too late to decide that you'd better not ignore it.

It's extremely unlikely that there will be any suit based on the mere act of making your own copy. All prior cases deal with distribution.

There already has been. The relevant case law is LLC v ReDigi:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitol_Records,_LLC_v._ReDigi....

> On March 30, 2013, Judge Richard J. Sullivan ruled in favor of Capitol Records, explaining that the transfer of digital data from one storage medium to another constituted a violation of copyright, because the copy was ultimately an unauthorized reproduction, and therefore outside of the protection of the first-sale doctrine

>claimed copyright infringement against ReDigi, a service that allows resale of digital music tracks originally purchased from the iTunes Store

AKA distribution. Without distribution, the owner cannot claim damages. So making your own copy for your own use does not fall under this.

Yeah. That’s the reason for DJs there is a license for “working copy” (bastard SIAE), especially if you’re downloading digitally and copying it to usb disk. If you are playing vinyl, they can suck my tonearm!

You need to proactively write your congressman (or local country equivalent) to make personal copies of media legal. Ideally make region locking illegal, and a dozen other things I can't remember off hand, but we have all been subject too at times.

Some have been found to be valid: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/End-user_license_agreement#Enf...

Yes, but the concern is not a legal one, it is a practical one.

"You have been found in violation of our EULA and we have therefore permanently deleted your account. Please check our support page at <404> for more information." - Any Service, to Any User.

Now what, for Any User? Hope you're famous enough to raise a stink on Twitter to get your account back? Pay $1B in legal costs to sue them?

How do you know a book in a shop wasn't printed by a rogue party? Maybe the "bookshop" had a EULA saying you don't own the book?

Buying a DRM book and stripping the DRM doesn't deny the seller, nor author, anything they previously had. It just lets you do what you paid for.

Just send them your own EULA at "purchase" if you think that unilateral terms no one reads should be binding on the other party.

This is not legal advice and is my own personal opinion.

> Just send them your own EULA at "purchase" if you think that unilateral terms no one reads should be binding on the other party.

I've heard, explicitly from lawyers, that sending an automated process (like a website) amendments to their EULA won't hold up at all in court. It's clear that the EULA is take it or leave it, and throwing changes at something that you know will ignore them doesn't accomplish anything.

It'd be nice if we could do it, but it doesn't fit into the reality of law.

It is also clear that few people read EULAs, so the courts should declare them invalid and apply the basic copyright law.

The difference between that and sending your "modifications" back is that you have an explicit, intentional choice to make: accept the EULA or don't use the site.

I think that the walls of text do need to be reigned in in acceptance of the fact that it's absurd to hire a lawyer to review all of those contracts, but I also somewhat sympathize with courts' opinions of "So you think you could just use the product and the contract doesn't apply to you because you didn't want to... Read?"

Most of those EULAs are saying what should be common sense. The law should just give me those rights, but because copyright hasn't caught up to the digital age and software we need something that allows me to copy into computer memory.

Anything that isn't 'common sense' needs to be a contract that a lawyer reviews for me

who cares, they can't take it from you

In this scenario I think the biggest issue with losing an account is the ability to aquire future purchases. But like I said, it's more a matter of principle for some. You own a book, you don't own a digital copy of a book.

This is the direction NFYs should have gone (could still go).

It would be great to be able to resell digital purchases, but that’s only on the consumer’s interest, so will never happen without an act of ${rule_making_body}.

This fundamentally does not work, because being able to copy is such an essential feature of electronic information. Think about it - you can never really "lose access" to information in the computer world unless you purposefully delete it completely, which cannot be realistically ensured.

I understand what's you're saying, that any digital scarcity is by design and therefore artificial.

But damn I wish my Steam library had a resale value.

As more games become unavailable for purchase (e.g., the recent nonsense Epic pulled with old Unreal games), it will.

If they sell you the digital copy, you own it.

If it says "license" on the button rather than buy then find another store...

This is not legal advice and is my own personal opinion.

On a related note, there ought to be a law that forbids the use of "BUY", "GET", or "PURCHASE" for things you would not in fact own. Instead, they should say "SUBSCRIBE" or "LICENSE".

I would also accept “RENT” or Long Term Rental

Those should be for licenses with an end date. "Subscribe" and "license" don't really imply there being a definite end date to your access, but nevertheless informs you that your access is contingent upon the continued existence of the business in question, unlike things you "buy".

To what bodies have you proposed such a law? I'm in total agreement with you.

So just buy a Kobo device without any account whatsoever and upload DRM-free epubs to it.

And how, pray tell, are they going to find out that you stripped the DRM from the books if you don't distribute them, without violating multiple privacy laws and perhaps even more?

They can't.

I am not sure how they’d know what you do to a file once you copy it to your PC, which is allowed.

While many on HN use Linux most of the world doesn't.

And while iOS, MacOS, Windows, Android are not known to deliver exact details of everything you do it is known they send back some "telemetry".

Given the way the world is going, your comment - while true now - may not be valid in 10 or 20 years.

It would certainly be a departure from now if they started sharing that data with third parties.

There are tradeoffs to cowardice, yeah.

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