Kindle's DRM Rears Its Ugly Head and It Is Ugly | Hacker News Reader

Kindle's DRM Rears Its Ugly Head and It Is Ugly

geardiary.com

208 points_pius41 comments

More details: http://www.geardiary.com/2009/06/21/kindlegate-confusion-abo...

The bottom line:

* You are able to redownload your books an unlimited number of times to any specific device.

* Any one time the books can be on a finite number of devices, decided by the publisher for each book. For most books this is 5 or 6 devices.

* If you hit the limit, Amazon can reset it much like iTunes lets you deauthorize all computers when you hit your limit.

This runs pretty much counter to the experience this guy is recounting in the original article.

Thank you for that link! It provides an ending to the story. If you want the short version, jump to the bottom of the page in the link above to where it says "So Here Is The Bottom Line." That sums up Amazon's policy, without going through the customer service drama.

Edit: Oops the parent post magically summed up the article in the time I was writing the above reply :p

While that is more reasonable, you still have to wonder about the fact that the DRM is so complicated that the customer service people don't understand it.

Amen. Burying the details of such a simple policy seems like it is set up by design to confuse the confidence of the consumer. They don't want you to know that you actually own your copy.

    When someone buys a book, they are also buying the right to resell that book, to loan it out, or to even give it away if they want. Everyone understands this.

Jeff Bezos, Open letter to Author’s Guild, 2002

    You may not sell, rent, lease, distribute, broadcast, sublicense or otherwise assign any rights to the Digital Content or any portion of it to any third party, and you may not remove any proprietary notices or labels on the Digital Content. In addition, you may not, and you will not encourage, assist or authorize any other person to, bypass, modify, defeat or circumvent security features that protect the Digital Content.

Amazon, Kindle Terms of Service, 2007

http://diveintomark.org/archives/2007/11/19/the-future-of-re...

http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html

Well at least he's trying to persuade the industry to change and become more open. They're already selling some kindle books at a loss because publishers want to charge Amazon the same price for an ebook as a physical one.

The whole point of DRM is to restrict what the customer can do with digital ciontent they've bought. It therefore follows that if you're in the habit of buying DRM-crippled products, sooner or later you're likely to get biten.

The solution to this is very simple: Just say no to DRM.

I'm a fairly happy Kindle owner, but the DRM is the biggest source of my dissatisfaction. I'd like to share my books with my wife (who has her own Kindle and Amazon account), but the DRM doesn't allow that. I'd like to read my books on my other devices (laptop, etc) but the DRM doesn't allow that. Of course, I knew those limitations when I got the Kindle and the books, but they are still limitations that bug me.

What my Kindle experience, in contrast to the DRM-free MP3's I buy from Amazon.com, etc., is teaching me is that even having the burden of learning the particular policies of a particular DRM scheme might be too much work for me. With my MP3's, I share them with my wife, burn them to CD's for the car, listen to them on all my devices, etc and so forth. I do not put them on file-sharing networks of any kind and never would. The same would be true of books.

So, ultimately, the device limits mentioned in the blog post is not even that big of a deal. Ultimately the problem is in the fact that DRMed ownership is a sort of negotiated ownership, and that by its nature makes it harder work and probably unsatisfying.

This is a complete hunch, but I bet in a few years time the DRM on books is going to go away much like the DRM on music has recently with iTunes/Amazon MP3's. Amazon needs a hook to get publishers to trust the device. If it gains mass appeal you'll probably see the DRM fade away.

It's much harder. E-books don't have a huge analog loophole.

Who uses the analog loophole anymore? Do what modern audio DRM stripping utils do and take the output of the document before it leaves the computer and programmatically re-assemble it. The eBook version of this would be creating a program that scrolls around the page area taking screen shots and reassembling them.

Like a photocopier/scanner?

No, not like a photocopier/scanner. A song with DRM can be played and rerecorded in real time. So ~4 minutes a song. This can also happen without human intervention.

A book can be scanned in hours at best, with a human involved the whole time. (I am sure there is specialty hardware that can do this, but that isn't quite the same a a commodity PC)

http://www.instructables.com/id/DIY-High-Speed-Book-Scanner-...

According to the author of the above instructable, it takes about 20 minutes to scan a book.

Still requires a lot more hardware and work than for music, but I must admit I've been surprised by the (obviously hand-scanned) books you can find sometimes on the net. Sometimes people are willing to go the extra mile...

In 1998, a CD-ROM drive cost around $100, and ripping a CD took around twenty minutes. That was CD-ripping's nascency. We're only dipping our toes in the book-digitizing nascency, and it takes around twenty minutes to rip a book and $300 for the platen and a couple digital cameras.

The Kindle app can run in the emulator, right? Write a script to take screenshots and page through the book. Bonus points for OCR. Is there a reason this wouldn't work?

The Kindle app can run in the emulator, right?

Nope. The iphone simulator doesn't emulate the ARM architecture, so even if you cracked the app store drm, you'd need to run it on an actual device. For something to run in the simulator, it would need to be compiled to i386.

It shouldn't be that hard to make a QEMU-based iPhone (or Kindle) emulator.

Obviously, Amazon and Apple would unleash their hordes of lawyers upon the poor person who ventured in such an ill advised adventure.

Sounds like a fun ill advised adventure to take part in.

Scanned PDFs are a pretty big analog loophole, even if they've not been OCR'd.

One loophole is that the contents for most books is plain text.

I remember having read that within days after some Harry Potter books were available in bookshops, they were already available in electronic form, retyped by dozens of volunteers. (for example: http://chrishall.wordpress.com/2006/03/17/link-list-reading-...)

Some were even translated... amazing.

Exactly. Laboriously scanning a whole book is far more effort than ripping a CD.

Even if the loophole for books is smaller, the point is, it only has to be applied once by anyone anywhere, after which it can be shared freely like any other non-DRM'ed file. I'm not convinced that the total amount of internet sharing of a work is decreased too much by the fact that is was in a physical form to start with.

In light of this, but also generally, it seems prudent to always strip DRM off your Kindle books and store them locally.

I was not aware that the DRM for Kindle had been cracked, although I am not at all surprised.

It is. Google for it.

Does anyone know if you can make a local copy (or imported PDF) have all the nice features the article describes, such as page syncing?

Basically, after everyone on Earth buys all available books, the only way to make extra money on books is:

a) to create new books b) to create new people

Option b) would not work very well for a number of reasons and option a), well, it's too difficult. Therefore go ahead and invent very smart option

c) make everyone repay for the same content over and over

d) create and sell cool new ebook reader gadgets

Once again, and this story is yet another example, poorly implemented DRM frustrates and alienates legitimate users, and doesn't do anything to stop a determined pirate who will almost always find a way to overcome the DRM.

The best DRM I've ever experienced is Steam, it takes away your ability to resell games, but gives you quite a lot of features in return. In fact until it was pointed out to me on HN some time ago, I didn't even notice that it was a form of DRM because it never gets in my way.

It's also an example of people who don't bother to search for the whole truth before complaining about (what turns out to be) an imagined slight... But yeah.

A Kindle owner myself, I've run into a few issues with the DRM being a problem, and a few other glitches. Amazon has resolved all of them, however, through firmware updates and changes on their back-end servers.

1) Bought a book which synced to my iPhone, but gave me an issue when reading it on the Kindle. Had to do a hard-reset of the Kindle and it fixed the problem. Happened a few months ago once when I got it. Issue hasn't occurred since then.

2) The auto-bookmark thing, letting you sync across devices, has been a little wonky in the past. Its gotten better as of last month.

Point is, it's still a semi-beta product with a few little hiccups here and there, but Amazon is doing a good job IMHO of improving it and getting everything to the point where it transparently works.

It's not so much a DRM issue as it is a bonehead policy and decision-making on the part of Amazon. I own a Kindle and I've never seen any notice anywhere saying I can only download my purchased items a limited number of times. I was led to believe I could re-download items whenever I needed to. The fact that this number varies by book is only more infuriating.

If they want to limit the number of downloads that's fine. I understand if they don't want people using gobs of bandwidth downloading things over and over again. But let us know so we know that it's critical to back these things up! It's a good idea to back up purchases regardless, but it's easy to forget about when you're under the impression your books are safe and accessible at any time from Amazon. This policy of not disclosing (or at the very least not making conspicuous enough) the terms of a purchase needs to change.

[EDIT]

Looks like a false alarm. Just a misinformed customer service agent.

This article contains inaccurate information! Ignore it and read the author's followup at http://www.geardiary.com/2009/06/21/kindlegate-confusion-abo...

Any DRM-crippled device is for chumps.

Not if it provides a useful service that's worth the DRM. The Kindle's worth it, as is something like Steam. I proudly use both.

That's fine but then people shouldn't complain when the DRM bites you in the ass. I realize you're not complaining but that seems to be the crux of this article (and the number of comments agreeing with it).

I don't know what the surprise is. These are pretty widely known limitations of the Kindle.

It's your own fault for not having your lawyer check the EULA for every book you buy on Amazon. sure it adds a couple of $100 to each book but it's the only way to be sure (well that or taking off and nuking Amazon from orbit)

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