Illegal you say?!? Oh no! Anyway…
this post was submitted on 25 Mar 2025
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The fact that something like this is illegal undermines the rule of law. People get so used to breaking it they don’t respect the institutions which then have less power.
I’m all for this but some folks with a fetish for hierarchy seem to have a problem with it.
I think it's more intended to (a) prevent casual piracy, and (b) to provide a legal stick for the cases where people do things like break-and-resell.
Don't get me wrong; I have no illusions about the industry. If they could figure out a way to reasonably eliminate all "ownership" and charge you per read; or, better yet, charge you a recurring fee whether you read or not (hello, subscription services), they would. If there are circles of hell, most of these people would find themselves in the fourth.
However, I think it's only worth the effort of prosecuting for gross violations, and probably few people in the companies care about folks de-DRMing their books, as long as they aren't sharing them. It's not hard to break the DRM, but it does require more knowledge and effort than, say, my mom is going to bother with.
The DMCA is still a stupid law, and should be repealed. This age of "you don't own something you buy; you only rent it" is the ultimate stage of capitalism where it becomes almost impossible to defend.
Well the US doesn't seem to want to honour trade agreements. Those of US outside the US should be contemplating whether to honour things like the DMCA when we're not even in their country...
I'm not even contemplating this. In my country I'm bound to follow the laws of my country, not of other countries. I don't know most of the laws in the US, and I don't desire to learn them since I don't see myself travelling there in the future. Same goes for the laws of other oppressive regimes like Iran or Russia.
Admittedly, when countries have trade agreements with one another, laws get rewritten to align countries with one another on things like IP. So foreign laws have a way it spilling over when new agreements are created. It usually goes both ways, to some extent, but the US can throw their weight around more than most.
In the agreement between Canada and the EU, for example, there are international mobility clauses in there for professionals (engineers, etc.) allowing them to bid on work in each other's jurisdictions. This of course required some work because laws on both sides needed adjusting. So laws governing the behaviour of engineers align slightly more now than before. Doesn't mean we're subject to EU law in Canada, but the example is illustrative.
Just say you did it to train your LLM.
I'm a bit of a LLM myself.
Oh well. Some laws are stupid. They dont always deserve to be followed. I mean our president has how many convictions?
And hes President so fuck it, rule of law is more like guidelines than actual law.
I like to think of laws as mere suggestions. If you want to follow them, go ahead. But don’t feel obliged to :)
As someone with a Kobo, Amazon's DRM is really annoying especially since a number of stories I read on sites like Royal Road publish e-books only on Amazon.
Agreed, I used to be able to pull them off and redo the DRM file into Epub, but as of this year, its not possible. Its prevented me from legally getting many authors I love on Royal Road.
I wish they would have partnered up with Baen or some other entity than Amazon.
Write them a letter.
I am curious about how these aspects interact with the DRM of e-library ebooks, which I believe is ethically justified
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