| NAL, not legal advice, just my current understanding: > after you buy it Generally, yes. What you do with that digital copy might be illegal, but the download was legal. Using a torrent to download (and seeding) might still be illegal even if only as a means to copying. > after you buy it on kindle That's a more interesting question. Given that they only grant you a license, you're in gray/black territory. When they previously gave you the impression that you were making a purchase you might have been in gray/light territory, but ignorance is rarely an excuse. > legalities vs practicalities Once I had one of those torrent honeypots catch a neighbor seeding. Comcast wasn't very careful with their timestamps or enforcement (or maybe the lawyer wasn't), and it happened close enough to an IP renewal that I caught the flak. If you don't get a lawyer involved, they'll blatantly ignore your right to counter DMCA claims and just infantalize you with a sermon about not stealing from intellectual property owners, placing you on a list of problem customers and eventually cancelling service (that last bit never materialized because it was my IP and my devices after the incident, so I never had too many strikes). What happens, exactly, if you "legally" pirate a book after you buy it on kindle? Who knows, but it might have negative consequences on par with actual enforcement as if you'd broken the law. |
There are exemptions granted to the DMCA anti-circumvention provisions every three years, but in general, e-books have not been exempted.
If you're just stripping DRM from your own purchased e-books, or are downloading a pirated copy from somewhere, it's unlikely that you'll get in trouble. But it's almost certainly not actually legal to do so.
(Of course, remember that if you're torrenting, you're also uploading, and the chances of you getting in trouble are higher... even if you disable your client's upload functionality.)