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Comment by sib | Hacker News Reader

I have more than 100 books that I bought with actual money on Apple's iBooks (or whatever it was called back in 2010-2012). I no longer use an iPad and would like to be able to read them on my Kindle. Because of DRM, I can't. I'm all for supporting authors and the various editors, etc., but I feel like I've already done that in this case.

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I don't see much of an ethical problem with downloading a pirated version of an ebook that you already paid for but can no longer access. If I did that, I'd have no problem sleeping at night.

Afaik, format shifting for convince is legal so long as you're Anthropic.

It was mostly a passing mention in the lawsuit against them where the damages are just for pirating books they didn't also buy. The fact that they bought used books and scanned them since its cheaper than ebooks was allowed by the court.

I think the key part was they scanned the books then destroyed the originals. I suppose the analog here would be to log into Amazon and delete the purchased ebooks.

I think they would've been allowed to do the scanning even without destroying the originals. AFAIK destroying the originals was just done to facilitate scanning — they needed the pages to be loose sheets, not bound.

They scanned then shredded the books so that publishers couldn't claim an unauthorized copy was made. All Anthropic did was a format shift which is allowed.

I agree with that

Yes, there should have been a law that required interoperable DRM.

At least you can transfer movies around different services. It’s a shame you can’t with books.

Ironically I worked on the project to enable that cross-provider interop for movies...

If there was an actual market demand for this then Kindle could license the technology.

It should be put into law, that when you buy something, you have the right to do with it what you want for personal use.

In the present case, Amazon clearly states that the customer is buying a book, so it should work the same way as buying a physical book.

One solution would be to buy a DRM free digital version.

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