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by wwweston 11 days ago
If you’re not redistributing ebooks you bought, it’s hard to imagine what legal claim someone could make against you, and even harder to establish the ethics of that claim.

To say nothing of Amazon’s ethics.

2 comments

Breaking any kind of DRM (or writing, distributing, or using software that does so) violates section 1201 of the DMCA[1]. The maximum penalty for a violation is $500k and up to 5 years in prison. There are some token exemptions but none would apply in this case.

Ethically it's all completely bunk, but more people should be aware how insane modern copyright laws are so that we can reform them. And this is not new, folks like the FSF and EFF protested the signing of the 1996 WIPO Treaty too.

[1]: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/1201

In some jurisdictions the act of removing DRM and any other similar kinds of protection is actually illegal by itself.

Ethics-wise, hard agree.