What this Country Needs is a Good Pirated Version of Kindle E-Books
Posted by Kevin Carson on May 1, 2009 in Commentary • 9 comments“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.” –Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, 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
Don’t buy the Kindle—at least until The Pirate Bay figures out how to crack its DRM and you can share ebooks files online. Until then, stick to buying your books on paper (or just check them out from the library and scan them). You can lend them or sell them at your own discretion, carry them around with you and read them wherever you want, without permission. In other words, when you pay for them they’re really yours.
I say that, by the way, as someone who markets a book via Amazon. I refuse to put out a Kindle edition of anything I’ve written. If you’ve got a Kindle reader and want Amazon to convert a pdf file of my books, have at it. I make it clear that everything I write is freely available under the Woody Guthrie public license: “Anyone found using our content without our permission will be considered mighty good friends of ours.” I refuse to enable the distributors of my work to behave abusively toward my readers, by stealing content they’ve previously paid for, or in any other way.
And as it turns out, if Amazon suspends your Kindle account (say, because you returned stuff too often), your reader becomes an inert chunk of plastic suitable for use as a doorstop or paperweight. All the e-books you’ve already bought and paid for can no longer be read. If you fall afoul of Amazon’s good graces, they’ll destroy your reader by remote and make the e-books you already “own” utterly worthless.
This is just another example of the general rule that, when it comes to digital content, you don’t ever own anything. As Cory Doctorow put it:
“in the name of protecting ‘intellectual property,’ big media companies are willing to do… violence to the idea of real property—arguing that everything we own, from our t-shirts to our cars to our ebooks, embody someone’s copyright, patent and trademark, that we’re basically just tenant farmers, living on the land of our gracious masters who’ve seen fit to give us a lease on our homes.”
If only somebody would figure out how to hack the Kindle’s DRM so you can duplicate e-book files and distribute them online.
The good news is that DRM is the biggest motivating force behind piracy. The DRM’ed stuff you buy “legally” seems deliberately calculated to be an affront to your convenience. You can’t switch from one platform to another, despite the fact that you supposedly “bought” it, because that would make it easy to lend to other people who might not pay for it. And it’s illegal to circumvent DRM so you can use the content you published in a way that’s easy for you. The traditional copyright doctrines of “fair use” and “first sale” that apply to printed material go out the window when it comes to digital content. But if you download a DRM-free version via a file-sharing network, you can do with it whatever you damn well please, without paying for the privilege of being kicked in the teeth.
The totalitarian lockdown society that the DRM mentality leads to, if pursued to its logical conclusion, was brilliantly illustrated by Richard Stallman in “The Right to Read” (just Google it—it’s free).
To repeat, DRM generates demand for pirated content.
And as it happens, Hugh D’Andrade of the Electronic Frontier Foundation claims Kindle’s DRM has already been cracked. Peter Sunde, one of the founders of Pirate Bay, last September expressed interest in the Kindle; he requested third party assistance in purchasing a reader and setting up a dummy account. Sunde was one of recently convicted The Pirate Bay defendants, but when it’s “hack Kindle’s DRM” time cracking down on particular individuals is like standing on the beach and commanding the tide to halt.
So please, somebody—hack the Kindle. The real pirates are at Amazon.
Kevin Carson is a senior fellow of the Center for a Stateless Society (c4ss.org) and holds the Center's Karl Hess Chair in Social Theory. He is a mutualist and individualist anarchist whose written work includes Studies in Mutualist Political Economy, Organization Theory: A Libertarian Perspective, and The Homebrew Industrial Revolution: A Low-Overhead Manifesto, all of which are freely available online. Carson has also written for such print publications as The Freeman: Ideas on Liberty and a variety of internet-based journals and blogs, including Just Things, The Art of the Possible, the P2P Foundation, and his own Mutualist Blog.
excellent points. i love the call out for hacking the kindle
this DRM crap is just part of the trend towards further control
sure, we're share-croppers or feudal peasants with the kindle (a terrible development), but what worries me even more is when gps will be standard (legally required) "safety" equipment in cars and when our cell phones can be listened in on even when they're off (with the battery still in)…
oh wait, the feds already can do the cell phone thing.
similar to the Luddites realization, i'm beginning to realize that the digitization of all technologies has 2 purposes. increased efficiency for profit making, and the ease of control.
it's easier to institute big brother when everyone has been forced to rely on (often in a life or death way) digital technologies. all they then need to do is control 0's and 1's to monitor and control everyone.
for instance, before computerization, lets say that in the 1970's i was pulled over for a routine traffic stop. but i had warrants out for unpaid parking tickets. there is no way this cop would know this info (unless i was on the FBI top 10 or something). so i would survive with only a speeding ticket. nowadays, if i'm pulled over, they can have all my info EVER obtained by the police state. (…including that one time i gave that cop a dirty look…)
p.s. for what other reasons can amazon suspend your account
pps omg, 'the right to read' is exactly what i just said
Great post; I agree with all of it, except for one nit–I cannot see why an author would refrain from releasing a book on kindle. There is no obligation to be an altruist, or to be a paternalist. Amazon is not abusive–no one is forced to use a kindle. IF you do so, you do so at your own risk. It's not stealing, or piracy, on the part of Amazon. If someone wants to buy your book on the kindle, and it's a "bad deal," so what? Caveat emptor.
The sad fact of the matter is that, if you have someone else publish your book, they usually end up owning the copyright and can then control how you use it (and if you self-publish, the powers that be in the publication world will – at the behest of the mainstream publishiers – ignore you).
They get us coming and going.
I must say I accepted a Kindle as a gift (from my wife) without considering the vulnerability. If the Kindle is hacked and owners download unauthorized books, will Amazon be able to detect that and suspend their accounts?
Stephan: I don't feel comfortable taking money from selling something that can be stolen from them by Amazon, when Amazon and I are in effect business partners. I only want to sell things on the understanding that they belong to the purchaser–period.
Sheldon: They might be able to, but you could just download the "pirated" version from the ebook equivalent of Napster or Pirate Bay.
BTW, I recently read that some iphone users are getting around the proprietary crap with AT&T by subscribing to VOIP phone service via Internet.
All these legal barriers to doing what you want to with your own stuff are just a high-tech Maginot Line, and the users are the Wehrmacht smashing through the Ardennes.
In regards to pirated content there are two factors that, ironically, Amazon is responsible for:
1) Native PDF support… There already exists several ways to convert a number of eBook formats (and hard copy formats) to PDF. I suspect native Kindle to Pdf conversion is only a matter of time.
2) Pushing college textbooks. OK…twenty years ago my textbooks were $100/each and the damn authors would release new editions (with no real new content) every year just so you could not sell back the used books. They are more expensive today and college students have both ample free time and severe lack of funds. Once they realize that if they get Dad to drop the cash on a Kindle DX they can take that text book money Dad gives them and buy beer and then pirate the textbooks – the gauntlet will be taken up by all.
All good protection schemes come to an end. Thankfully.
Please check also iRex iLiad, a bit more hacker-friendly e-reader from the Netherlands:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ILiad
http://www.irextechnologies.com/products/iliad
However, the price is currently quite salty, which is no wonder,
as almost all these e-readers (Kindle, Sony LibriE, Iliad) use the technology
of the one and same company:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E_Ink_Corporation
I wonder when their patents will expire, sometimes before 2020? Or whether Japanese will come with something of their own meanwhile, to push the price down:
( Try with keywords e-paper at: http://techon.nikkeibp.co.jp/english/search_en.js… )
I bought a kindle but I haven't registered it at amazon and I don't buy their DRM'd books from them, I load it with freely downloaded pdfs and epubs. I doubt very much they are able to brick my kindle right now.
Amazon has been selling a stolen version of my ebook package in kindle format for months despite several notifications to their copyright department with all the required proof that this was the case. We retain full copyright and never gave permission to anyone at any time to repackage it and sell it in any format. Amazon continues to shamelessly profit at our expense from this theft. They never even responded to us. I will never buy anything from Amazon again.