[throwaway1974]

If it was not for DRM removal tools I would have recently been screwed by Amazon, here is my story:

I was a longtime customer (easily 10 years or more I think) and have bought every version of Kindle to have come out over the years (unfortunately they break easily) and have build up a large collection

Recently I replaced the debit card on my account as the old one expired, placed and order for a digital game code for my xbox one (done it many times before) and bang my account was nuked. Yes I used 2fa no my account was not hacked by anyone. No I never abused their refund policy as some people do. Yes I tried resetting my password and get an email about password change BUT still can not login as it errors out.

I must have rang dozen of times (chat doesnt work if you dont have an account) and send as many emails to everyone from support to [e-mail] (apparently this is a shortcut to get attention to your case) in all cases was told an "account specialist" would get in contact, yadda yadda but no luck.

If it was not for deDRM tools (which I started to use after the 1984 "incident" few years back) all of my books would have been unreadable now, had to deregister the kindle too since account doesnt work.

I wonder how many people who are not as tech savy get screwed and are left with nothing.

[Yetanfou]

Don't rely on any 'official' solution to maintain your digital library as those are sure to stop working in one way (company goes bankrupt or gets bought) or another (planned obsolescence, forced upgrade, etc) in a few years time. Configure your own using one of the existing tools; if you use Owncloud or Nextcloud you could use my OPDS Catalog app (https://apps.owncloud.com/content/show.php?content=168132), possibly combined with Reader (https://apps.owncloud.com/content/show.php/Reader+(ebook+rea...) for when you happen to be without a reader device.

Try to send the industry a signal by refusing to buy encumbered books (DRM, proprietary formats, etc). If you feel like you absolutely must have a book which is only available in an encumbered format I'd suggest you convert it to an open and unencumbered format as soon as you get your hands on it. Store it in this format, it should be usable in years to come.

Keep good backups, this is one of the advantages of a digital library which partly offsets its greater vulnerability to disaster compared to a physical library. It takes a lot of effort to destroy a physical library, but a simple rm -rf will do for a digital one. Store your backups in several locations, off-site, somewhere out on the 'net in an encrypted container file (free cloud storage accounts are handy for this purpose, just refresh them every now and then and don't rely on them as a single source).

[vidarh]

Second this. While I do occasionally buy Kindle books, I only buy them as long as the DRM is straightforward to remove. The moment they get aggressive about DRM, it'll be the last time I ever buy one.

I don't feel strongly enough about it to avoid books I want to read that are only available with DRM, but I do insist on having an unencumbered copy.

And when a book is available from a source I know are good about not using DRM, I will aim to buy from there, and buy direct in preference to buying from a DRM-friendly outlet - e.g. I prefer to buy from O'Reilly direct for that reason.

The only form of "DRM" I don't mind are the e-book stores that provide you with a personalised copy that includes my name/e-mail, but otherwise leaves the book unprotected.

[kefka]

>The only form of "DRM" I don't mind are the e-book stores that provide you with a personalised copy that includes my name/e-mail, but otherwise leaves the book unprotected.

And that also implies that you give up right of resale.

I can sell a physical book after I have it. I can choose to write my name in there... Or not. Having my name plastered as you indicate is OK, means giving up my own guaranteed rights of resale.

[PhasmaFelis]

I feel like right-of-resale is legitimately complicated for digital products. The right to resell a physical object doesn't give you the right to mass-produce it, but for digital products the two processes are identical.

[comex]

Not really. You can still legally sell a physical book if you've written your name in (if the buyer doesn't mind), and you can always remove your name from a non-DRMed eBook (though there may be more subtle forms of tracking left in).

The first sale doctrine is a legal matter, and unfortunately in the US it's been found essentially inapplicable to digital copies [1] whether there's a watermark or not. In other jurisdictions it may be applicable, but again probably regardless of the presence of a watermark.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitol_Records,_LLC_v._ReDi....

[vidarh]

That's fine with me - I never resell my books.

But yes, you need to keep it mind.

[JoshTriplett]

> And that also implies that you give up right of resale.

I'd love to see that tested.

[z3t4]

is it not the copyright owners right to allow others to resell or not!?

[Silhouette]

That certainly wasn't the original intent of copyright law, and in most places it wouldn't be the default position. Copyright is normally about controlling the making of new copies, not retaining control over an existing one after sale. The difficulty is that copyright law has been extended in various ways over the years.

Some of those extensions might seem reasonable and in the spirit of the original law. For example, in some places buying a single private copy of a movie on DVD doesn't give you a legal right to show that work, for money, to the general public, even if it's still your physical DVD in the player.

Other extensions in the scope of copyright protection have been much more dubious. For example, just about anything in the digital world tends to be vulnerable to arguments about making copies in a computer's RAM while you're running the software, playing the movie, listening to the song, or whatever it might be. Some horrible law has been made in some places using this kind of argument, even though it's totally distorting the spirit of the original copyright principle since you're only enjoying the copy you lawfully possess and not really making further copies to redistribute to anyone else. Trying to limit resale rights is another hot topic.

Some places have rather more sane laws in these respects, and even some reasonable discussions among the governing and lawyerly classes about how digital works should be handled in the modern age and how to balance the intended protection of creators with the legitimate right for customers to enjoy what they paid for. But there is still a long way to go even in the more enlightened legal environments today, and plenty of first world countries are far behind in their thinking so far.

[kefka]

I absolutely have the right to buy a copy , watch it/read it, and sell it to someone else. First sale doctrine states that.

I don't have the right to make and sell copies. I do certainly have that right for the original.

[6stringmerc]

Part of the issue with this case, to me, is that the standing for bunnie does not adequately describe what is believed to be "paid for" content. As in, there is no differentiation between a streamed license or a purchased 'copy' in technical terms. To me this is a very important sticking point, legally, simply considering the nature of modern commerce.

[michaelmrose]

With physical items it most certainly is not on principal a digital item ought to be the same however I don't know how you enable that without drm.

Maybe the inherently absurd situation is best resolved by giving up the absurd notion of artificial scarcity.

[benologist]

I'd go one step further and build your own private cloud for a bunch of stuff. I did all this easily through a slick web interface for open source software and linux that Synology has created.

A lot of this stuff includes apps for phone/tv/etc that you can download for free in stores or even from their own site, and it can be available to everyone in your household for some pretty decent savings - if it still works in a year I'll have saved more than I spent on it ($290 + disks x4).

- cloud files almost directly equivalent to Dropbox, I haven't solved sharing files yet but I have versioning and undeleting for my work

- note server like OneNote with a browser extension to save pages, screenshots etc

- music streaming ala Amazon Music et al

- torrent downloading I guess is like seed boxes but never had one

- video streaming server like Netflix

- photo uploading like iCloud

- email server, didn't actually install this one yet but everything else is up and running

- dns server with network-wide ad/malware/tracker blocking

[Yetanfou]

That is exactly what something like Owncloud/Nextcloud (for which I made those book/publication-related tools) enables you to do: create a 'private cloud' (what a silly word it is, really... cloud). It does some of the things you mention 'out of the box' (file storage, photo uploading) or after installing some 'apps' (note server, music streaming, video streaming, email user agent (not a mail server)). Since it runs on *nix you get the rest (mail server, dns server) more or less 'for free', just configure it the way you want.

[benologist]

Same in principal, but Synology have built a lovely, multi-window web interface for a lot of linux and each of those apps, along with their own Android + iOS apps.

https://www.synology.com/en-global/dsm/live_demo

That consolidates a lot of different UIs, signins, permissions etc into a single coherent interface - even terminal commands like configuring firewall, network interfaces, user permissions, all that stuff.

To give you some examples it takes two clicks, a domain and any contrived email address to get a Let's Encrypt certificate. It takes three more clicks to assign it to a web app Synology is serving from that device. You can add SSL to your own reverse-proxied app, also effortless to add, just as easily and enable HSTS with a checkbox.

Their torrent software can watch RSS feeds and download straight into a folder where it's indexed for their video server. Their video client provides a nice interface for browsing but delegates the actual playback to VLC.

[eropple]

> cloud files almost directly equivalent to Dropbox

And when your electronics get trashed by water damage or the stray lightning strike? Cloud computing involves redundancy and fault tolerance and a box in your closet is neither. That goes particularly for "almost directly equivalent to Dropbox"; even setting aside sharing, "not having everything go up in smoke because my house burns down" is kind of a killer-app feature.

You can, of course, build a "private cloud". (I've done it for clients before!) But it will cost you.

[benologist]

It can also automatically sync whatever you want to any of dozens of archiving services... encrypted or not. Including Amazon Cloud Drive boasting unlimited space for $60/year, BackBlaze B2, S3, Glacier, Dropbox, Google Drive etc.

It can keep a redundant NAS in sync too but not sure how seamless that would be in practice if you wanted redundancy for the software running on it.

However what really makes me optimistic about this stuff is the aligned interests:

- a great software experience for their hardware leveraging open source solutions (I think it's brtfs for the versioning/restoring, transmission for torrents etc)

vs

- Dropbox selling a blob of space for $10/month and trying to solve the "problem" of you not paying more by lying in their advertisements

[dublinben]

I would argue that it is more ethical to purchase a physical copy of the book you would like, then download a DRM-free copy from alternate sources. You have covered yourself ethically (and maybe even legally?) by purchasing a copy/license, without supporting the DRM-crippled offering. If more customers started to affect sales in this way, publishers might take a hint, and drop DRM.

[CharlesW]

> Configure your own using one of the existing tools; if you use Owncloud or Nextcloud you could use my OPDS Catalog app…

Okay, so this is a whole new world for me. Thank you!

OPDS appears to be for electronic publications what RSS is to blogs and podcasts. There are feeds, there's content management software that generates them (like "OPDS catalog"), and there are reader-style apps to consume them and view the syndicated content. Yes?

But as someone with tons of Kindle purchases, I'm a little confused about where to go from here, and how to protect myself from what happened to throwaway1974. Is there an "OPDS for Dummies"?

[Yetanfou]

OPDS for dummies? There is the Mobileread wiki (http://wiki.mobileread.com/wiki/OPDS) which gives some pointers to catalogs and software, but it doesn't really explain all that much.

What OPDS enables you to do is gain access to a collection from any OPDS client device. To test it you can just install an OPDS-compatible reader on a phone or tablet or some such device and point it at an OPDS catalog. If you install FBreader (for Android) you'll find a number of OPDS catalogues pre-configured for your perusal, it is also possible (and easy) to add your own. You'll be able to browse the catalog, search for publications (something which I have not implemented in my Owncloud/Nextcloud tools yet due to the (IMnsHO) lacking search infrastructure in Owncloud) and download publications to the device. So yes, in this way it works just like a feed reader, which makes sense as it is based on the same technology (RSS and Atom).

Kindle does, as far as I know, not support OPDS - I don't have one so I can not try. I do know that it has a (rudimentary) browser so that might be an option to get access to publications on a 'personal cloud server'. In the case of OPDS Catalog you can just point the browser at the library root in the Owncloud/Nextcloud 'Files' app to see the same files as those which are served through the OPDS feed, bar any filtering done on the latter (it can be configured to show only certain types of files and/or to skip certain patterns). You will not see the metadata which OPDS Catalog has collected on those publications, once Nextcloud matures I'll see if it is feasible to implement this as an addition to the Files app.

Calibre (https://calibre-ebook.com/) is able to convert publications on the fly to a format understood by (unmodified= Kindle devices. It also contains a server which publishes in both OPDS as well as HTML, the latter would be useable on a Kindle. I think Calibre does a good job on the conversions but it is rather overweight and overly complex to use as a server. Of course there are other options, check that Mobileread wiki I linked to for some examples.

[CharlesW]

This is very helpful, thanks again!

[Natsu]

You make me wonder what I should do to preserve my Steam account now... Maybe there's some way to get a VM image of the computer in offline mode?

[Karunamon]

Steam DRM is even more trivially defeated than Amazon DRM. Drop 4 files in the game folder and run it.

[Natsu]

Which four?

[Karunamon]

I don't dare look this up on a work machine, but a google in the general direction of "Steamworks emulator" should get you going. The files in question are modified Steamworks DLLs (x86 and x64), an info file that holds the Steam metadata for the game, and a launcher to read it.

[Natsu]

Hrm. DDG shows one (unhelpful) result for that. Google sent me running in circles. Has this emulator been taken down?

[eatbitseveryday]

> Try to send the industry a signal by refusing to buy encumbered books (DRM, proprietary formats, etc).

This is what animal rights activists are advocating to do with meat products in the industry. Does the technique work, universally? Does it have success? It sounds reasonable, but requires a lot of people to change their behaviors.

[slavik81]

I think it's a lot easier for DRM than for animal welfare. For one, DRM directly affects your use of the product, while animal abuse occurs out-of-sight somewhere far away. DRM has no consumer benefit, which also makes agreement easier. Where each consumer draws the line for animal abuse varies considerably and it takes significant personal research to choose brands.

[zardo]

Boycotts can work because you are able to excersize social influence and slowly change the morals of your society. What you eat is going to be something that people you interact with learn about you.

How you interact with DRM isn't something many people are going to learn about you unless you make an effort to share it.

[superuser2]

I've taken to viewing Kindle books as a very expensive indefinite-but-temporary library loan. Between the years+ length of the borrowing period, instant delivery, lighted screen, compactness, and travel-friendliness it can be worth the premium over a public library loan. In dollars per hour of entertainment, it's better than some options. But it is ultimately a rental.

If you have a relatively progressive library and prefer to cope with scarcity by waiting for a "digital copy" to become available and then reading the book in a narrow time window (rather than paying ~$10), you can generally get an actual temporary Kindle book from your library for free.

If the Kindle price is too high for a book that will eventually leave your possession, buy it on paper.

[kakarot]

Orrrr support a non-DRM publisher. Ya know

[wlesieutre]

Kobo sells some books without DRM. But there's no way to search by it, and it's no longer mentioned on the search results page. It used to be, but they removed that for god knows what reason. Now you have to click on a book and scroll down to the bottom of the page to check the download options.

But hey, still better than Amazon and Nook.

EDIT: if anyone's a fan of fantasy, all of Brandon Sanderson's stuff is DRMless. That's the example I can remember off the top of my head.

Details section down below the reviews, you'll see "Download options:EPUB 3 (DRM-Free)"

Example here https://store.kobobooks.com/en-us/ebook/the-way-of-kings-1

[lfowles]

Amazon and BN sell _some_ books without DRM as well. To encompass your Sanderson example, all of Tor ebooks[0] are DRM free regardless of distribution channel.

[0]: http://www.tor.com/2012/07/20/torforge-e-books-are-now-drm-f...

[wlesieutre]

Oh interesting, I guess I haven't paid much attention to the ebook markets since I bought my Nook Simple Touch, I've just made a habit of checking Kobo first because they were the ones offering no-DRM at the time. Good to know!

[superuser2]

Fuck no. Life is too short and literature matters too much to pass on good books and read worse ones just because of their publishers' DRM politics.

Don't reward DRM-encumbered ebooks, sure. If you want to punish the publisher, just buy it used on paper or go to the library. But read the books you wanted to read in the first place.

[bad_user]

Not sure what you're disagreeing with.

First of all, all Kindle books are DRM-protected, yet you can find many of them DRM-free, especially the technical ones, if you buy them from their publishers directly instead of places like Amazon. I can also show you books selling in Google's Play Store or other places without DRM, whereas all Amazon Kindle books are DRM-enabled.

But speaking about short lives, while I agree with buying books in print (I love to buy used books btw), authors that are alive and that still own the copyright are often complicit in this. So why should I read the ebook of somebody that doesn't respect me? From my point of view, a book takes some resources to read, which could be better spent on authors and publishers that do respect me enough to not DRM-enable those books. Or in other words, there are thousands, tens of thousands of books I could be reading, I only have bandwidth for about 2-4 per month and the rules of competition still apply.

Also, to get one thing straight, there's nothing holy about reading books. It's just another form of entertainment.

[kakarot]

I didn't say anything about not buying paper. I don't know how you extrapolated that.

I prefer books in print but those two philosophies can coexist. Get DRM-free e-material when appropriate, and print otherwise. I prefer manuals in searchable ebook form while books and novels are definitely more pleasing in print.

[abawany]

I kind of do a variant of this. I buy used paper books and then send them to bookscan.us for scanning. Et voila: non-DRMed ebook. Oftentimes, the price of this activity, ignoring the time element, is lower than the price of the DRMed ebook.

[fsloth]

If I need a book for a specific deep topic it's usually unlikely to find the specific material from someone else.

[dwyerm]

I started buying from Angry Robot a while back because they sent me free DRM-free epubs to get me hooked on their authors. I've been buying from them ever since, and that's the only reason I discovered that Chuck Wendig's books are amazing. Sure, I've got to pay in GBP instead of USD, but this is the internet and with digital delivery, that kind of stuff doesn't matter.

Unfortunately, everyone else discovered that Chuck was good, so he moved to a big publisher and I assume they required him to go with DRM. I can no longer find his books unencumbered.

tl;dr: There are great non-DRM publishers, and they might have great books. It is in our interest to support them.

[criddell]

If you can document this, you should contact the EFF legal team and offer your testimony as someone harmed by DRM.

I'm not anti-copyright or pro-piracy in any way, but if I had lost everything I bought because of a DRM snafu, I'd have no ethical concerns torrenting new copies of the things I lost.

In fact, if Amazon upgrades their Kindle DRM so that it is no longer easily removed, I think I would probably torrent copies of things I buy just so I have an effective backup.

[T0T0R0]

The only scenario, in which DRM makes any sense at all, is B2B patronage.

Other businesses probably SHOULD license hobbled, encrypted garbage from provider businesses. It's a use case where a collective group of people decide to use a pre-defined set of noises and pictures for some reason or another. But who cares why, and no one on the consumer side of that transaction really owns the media samples directly. The provider company owns the masters and the subscriber company owns the user license, and outside of the context of the companies in question, those things might be worthless curiosities.

But for individual consumers, DRM makes no fucking sense at all. It's abusive corporate group-think from square one. Any implementation that causes you to question whether you should share something with your friends, lest you harm a business that extracts money from you, is something of an abomination.

[acdha]

A lot of this comes down to terminology: the people who are the most upset about DRM are the people who thought they were “buying” something in the same manner as a physical item and are at some point rudely reminded that the company considers it more like a temporary license. Very few people mind services like Netflix or Spotify because it's extremely clear that you're paying for a month of access at a time.

I doubt we're going to get much legal change in the short term but imagine how different the discussion would be if there was a clear labeling law which required either labeling things as rentals with a very clear time window or the company is required to either provide access or refund your money should their system lock you out.

[bad_user]

The problem is of course that we as humans don't like to rent, we like to own and for good reasons. We only prefer to rent when overall the price is much better than owning or when we don't have a choice.

Netflix and Spotify don't have a problem with their subscribers because the price is fair. $10 per month is fair for unlimited access to TV shows that you like. $10 is also fair for unlimited access to all the music that you want. And in fact both Netflix and Spotify don't really need DRM in order for them to work. I can already find all of that content on PirateBay, all of that content has already been pirated. And if I'm paying for Netflix, I might do so out of convenience and because pirating is illegal.

But charge $10 for an eBook or $15-$30 for an audio book or $10 for a music album and that price is no longer fair with DRM. The problem is that these companies want to have their cake and eat it too, by creating the illusion of ownership, with people not realizing they are locked-in until it is too late. And that should be clearly illegal, I wonder when people will wake up.

[dhimes]

But these prices haven't changed much in decades. Books have always cost that much, as have albums (the exception being textbooks). Discount vinyl record albums were US $5.99 in the 1970s.

I have issues with DRM, but not because I find the prices exorbitant.

[mfoy_]

The prices haven't changed if we are talking ownership. But we are not talking about ownership, we're talking about licensing.

That dichotomy is what we're talking about. People are tricked into thinking they are buying a book. They are not. They are renting a book at the same price as buying.

[jessaustin]

When you bought vinyl or CDs, you owned that. How can a temporary rental be worth the same?

[tedunangst]

Because it takes up less space in my house.

[marcosdumay]

> Books have always cost that much

How much renting them used to cost?

[hsod]

What makes a price fair?

[TeMPOraL]

The general perception of the marginal cost of a vendor of stocking and selling the good, as compared with the price they ask you and the value-added service they offer. With digital goods, the marginal cost of delivering you a copy is pretty much zero. As for service provided - it depends, but most of the time, the service itself doesn't seem to be costing much more than "pretty much nothing".

What matters is perception. To use Amazon Kindle Store as an example - the primary service they (and most on-line merchants) offer you is... a payment gateway. It doesn't seem expensive. They also host the ebooks, but again - downloading digital goods is free at the margin. You could say that e-book prices also subsidize Kindle R&D and/or manufacturing (not sure if that's true, but assuming it for the sake of an example) - but at this point I have to ask, why should I care?

Businesses like to move around costs and profits and do anything but transparent pricing in order to maximize profits. Koerig sells you coffee machines at a loss for price X, and then tries to make it up with DRMed, overpriced coffee pods. I feel it's unfair because - why should I care about the coffee pods subsidizing my coffee maker? They didn't tell me up-front they're doing it, they just sell me a coffee maker for X.

Similarly with ebooks. The marignal costs to the retailer are zero, so the price should be low too - if they're subsidizing something with ebook sales, that's not my problem. I'll call expensive ebooks unfairly priced. If they want me to think the price is fair, they need to work on my perception of their cost structures, instead of obfuscating everything.

[nickbauman]

This is why generally I don't buy Amazon stuff for my kindle. 99% of my kindle contains stuff that was either free in the first place (ibilio, gutenberg proj, etc) or was purchased without DRM installed.

I made an exception with Audible but I'm going to cancel it because while I love the idea of Audible, I've been racking up freebees every month and not pulling the trigger because I just don't have the time.

[acdha]

I generally see it as a price threshold: when a Kindle book is much cheaper than the paperback I'm willing to accept getting less value, especially if it's something like book n in a series which I'm going to read on the plane and don't expect to reread.

[michaelmrose]

Probably nobody would be on board with paying 25-90 to rent a singular work for 5-20 years.

[Noos]

The reason for DRM is to make casual piracy harder. Piracy will always exist, but if it goes beyond a certain point, it can disrupt and destroy the value of a created work. Creative work as it is is already devalued to the point where you are better off investing the hours spent into working at Mcdonalds and reaping a wage from that. If it gets prominent enough, things could get even worse.

I mean, if all you make from a novel is a $5,000 advance for a years labor, and you find that not only can you not rely on ebook sales to earn that out, the pirated copy cannibalizes print sales too, it's not a good thing right?

[hga]

Wow, thanks for the implicit warning, I've been an Amazon customer since a year after they opened, am using them very heavily right now as I remodel and move to a small house built in 1910, and it would be crippling to be disconnected from my order history and wish lists.

I've only bought a very few Kindle books sold for $0 or on deep discount, never bought a Kindle, and only bought 1-2 digital copies of music when the CD was out of print and way too expensive. No way will I buy another digital item from Amazon if they make it this dangerous....

I don't think they want this outcome, but the more they savage their customers like they did you, the more it'll happen.

[skolos]

Comment on "Kindle breaks easily". I have different experience. About 6 years ago I got Kindle for my birthday. Happily used it for half a year and then misplaced and couldn't find it for another half a year. Then I found it - it fell in a gap in my outside furniture and was lying outside exposed to elements for all this time. To bring it back to life all I needed is to charge it - used it for more than 5 years after that without any issues.

[derekp7]

My significant other ends up going through about 1 kindle every year or so. She uses the backlight and reads it sometimes 2 - 4 hours a day. What happens is it starts randomly crashing or locking up, or just acting wonky when it hits around the 1 year mark.

[anbende]

Same here. I got a paperwhite for Christmas 4-5 years ago. No problems. Still works well. And I use it every day.

The battery doesn't last as long as it used to, but it's still good for days.

I do keep the backlight as low as possible...

[Noos]

i've gone through multiple ones myself, the e-ink screen is the big failure point.

[bsharitt]

I'll only buy DRM content as long as I can easily remove it, and right now the only DRM content I regularly buy is books mostly from Google and Amazon. The first thing i strip the DRM and archive it.

[pdkl95]

I recommend against the buy-and-strip approach, because you are still signaling that you are ok with (some) DRM. The only signal you are sending back to the manufacturer is your purchase. The only thing the manufacturer sees is how the addition of DRM affects their profit, and you're telling them that the DRM is acceptable.

[patrec]

This battle is lost and the reality is already much worse than just DRM. It is increasingly impossible to actually own digital content and all content is moving to digital. You only lease at the revocable pleasure of some multi-billion dollar corporation. No resale, no inheritance, no right of refusal of obnoxious TOS changes if you want continued access.

Yes, for some technical books it is still possible to buy a DRM free pdf and have something approximating ownership rights, including resale -- for example http://shop.oreilly.com/category/customer-service/ebooks.do.

But as far as I can tell that's only true for a tiny techical niche -- if there is an alternative to kindle, amazon etc. that actually has a reasonable selection and true ownership I'd love to hear about it.

[pdkl95]

Yes, you might have to do without some things.

This is why some of us were making a lot of noise about this problem 20+ years ago, when sending the message that "leasing"/DRM isn't acceptable didn't require a significant sacrifice. Unfortunately everyone - including engineers that should have known better - was more interested in the media industry's shiny baubles than investing their future property rights.

So now that same fight will probably require some amount of sacrifice. Are you willing to pay that cost now? Or do you want to wait while this transfer of rights to continues? This cost will only increase the more we allow DRM to spread.

[patrec]

You seem to imply I have a moral obligation to make sacrifices for the cause of consumer rights, but realistically any call to collective action that imposes comparatively large costs to the individual for very slim chances of success is doomed to failure and a misdirection of energies that would better be spent elsewhere.

I will continue to seek out and prefer non-DRM, non-leased content where available at acceptable cost, but consumers voting with their wallets is not going to solve this.

[TeMPOraL]

Well, we had Stallman saying those things for decades, and everyone in tech mocked and ignored him instead.

[patrec]

Stallman does deserve credit for his farsightedness. At the same time, he never provided a realistic alternative (the FSF tithing hardware manufacturers to centrally plan us some Lisp machine bootstrapped on Unix software utopia is not).

[dexterdog]

DRM is acceptable to me as long as it is removable. I'll let them think that they are getting one over on me when they are not.

[derekp7]

The recourse for anyone else would be a lawsuit in small claims court. That would at least get their attention, and possibly an issue resolution.

[lmm]

Credit card chargebacks for every kindle book you bought? Would probably remove all chance of reconciliation, but it would send a message.

[daenney]

I doubt it works just like that. If you do that you'll have to file for a claim, which will then be investigated by your bank or credit issuer. There's some procedures around what you can and cannot claim for and more things that need to happen according to the Fair Credit Billing Act (in the US). Since you've already taken possession of the good and used it I'm not sure you'll get much out of it though I have no idea how this would even work/apply to digital works.

And I doubt they'll let you go back years.

[rspeer]

Your credit card company needs Amazon more than they need you. They would side with Amazon.

[joesmo]

I'm not surprised. Amazon treats its customers like shit. They sell a lot of shit products from China especially that break immediately and they don't care. They do NOT have a refund policy like the one you claim other people violate, but they will shut down accounts randomly with messages about violating said NONEXISTENT policy, even accounts that haven't had returns. Their algorithms are shit, in other words. You should sue them, seriously, in small claims.

[vollmond]

And now I know what I'm doing tonight.