It's really time for laws which forbid companies to
terminate accounts and access to them if they met certain conditions like licencing digital properties. Sure, they can restrict them all they want, as long as a fair stance prevails und people are not ripped of their goods.
This strong difference in powers between companies and customers in the digital realm becomes more and more a serious problem. When people are stop buying digital goods or anything of certain types, just because they have no legal security, then it harms also companies themself. so it should be in their own interesst to support such things.
There was a time in Europe when a strong movement for digital rights existed, but to bad it somehow died down.
What they need is a legally required termination procedure, so when the company shuts down, or if business with a user is terminated, it MUST supply the user with accessible digital goods equivalent to their library, or else the company is liable for goods not delivered.
Or... just throwing this out here... they could start by selling actual digital goods which they advertise by a "BUY" button, and charge a service fee if you want them to keep a copy around in their cloud. That way you have your own copy, and the convenience of not having to keep track of where you stored those bits, and when the company inevitably dies/goes bankrupt/is sold/merges with Disney they stop charging the service fee and stop providing the service and you go back to keeping track of your own copy of the bits.
This is why I like places like Humble Bundle, you literally get a download link with PDFs (as well as other formats). It encourages piracy of course, but then again the moment somebody else could view your content on a device you don't control - it was already copy-able.
If the ebook publishers were motivated to, they would encode unique properties into the text of each download that uniquely identifies the transaction. Then if you find copies online you know who to chase.
The point is, give me my copy of the file, I don't want to be locked into your system.
What good are rights when corporations can just have users sign them away by agreeing with some policy? They already make users waive a lot of rights, including the right to pursue legal action, the right to reverse engineer...
> corporations can just have users sign them away by agreeing with some policy
These shrink wrap licences can be legislated away. Lots of EU countries have consumer protection legislation that explicitly forbids/invalidates such imbalanced or unexpected terms in the fine print for consumer-facing contracts -- or indeed invalidates shrink-wrap licence terms outright.
That form of broken legal system is, as far as I know, peculiar to the USA. In most of the world, businesses aren't allowed to arbitrarily negate laws specifically created to protect their customers just by including some weasel words in the fine print. In fact, here in the UK and at least across much of Europe, businesses are required to actively inform their customers of various rights and other details, and failing to do so can have significant consequences.
Regulate as utilities/infrastructure. Nobody likes the Ma Bell type of anti-trust because it feels like infringing on private property rights but regulating as utility or infrastructure is much widely accepted and palatable. However if you have poor management then you end up in the P&G situation with blame passing from one generation of management to another and no real improvements.
People need to talk with their wallet to get the message across.
There is nothing stopping people from buying a 'dumb' e-reader with internal storage where you load epub/pdf/rtf/txt files that you actually own or borrow from a library.
Where does a person with very little technological knowhow go to get these epub/pdf/rtf/txt files to somehow load onto this "dumb" e-reader they buy? What is a "dumb" e-reader? What software does a "dumb" e-reader need.
There is a reason that Kindle prevail, and it's not because of some conspiracy or a giant company. It's because it's easy, basically like going to Chapters or Barnes and Noble and walking out with a book. There is no similar avenue for "dumb" e-readers. They need to know several levels of skills to get it and it's a lot more difficult then clicking "Buy" and start reading.
I don't think it's reasonable to expect the market to fix this through customer boycotts. Customers just don't have the time or technical knowledge to understand the issues, and I don't think it's reasonable to expect them to.
In cases like this where there's a huge imbalance in power and technical knowledge between suppliers and users, I think it's perfectly reasonable for the government to legislate on the behalf of it's constituents to protect their interests.
I think at this point it's been clearly demonstrated that DRM is simply not necessary to protect functioning markets in digital goods. Apple showed this with iTunes, arguing forcefully for DRM free music downloads. I'm a gamer and there's a very vibrant and successful market in DRM free PDFs in the tabletop gaming industry. I'm no extremist, I don't object to all DRM in every case, but I think arbitrary lockouts like this are clearly wrong, and a right to DRM free copies of material you have bought if a service expires or closes is perfectly fair.
Like managing your own mp3 library, it's incredibly inconvenient compared to the cloud option. I've done it for years with music, and I'm very happy to just be able to stream whatever I want instead. Same with books.
I don't think asking people to figure out how to manage files is a reasonable request. There's a growing number of people whose computer is a phone or tablet.
It probably mostly died down because the battle really was elsewhere than in Europe. The EU does try to regulate American tech companies though; how successfully, that's up for debate.
Those of us that support digital rights vote with our wallets. I would like to read ebooks. I don't have a source to BUY ebooks that I want. So I don't read them.
Please tag this as 2012. It would be interesting to see a summary of this issue since then -- has Amazon made this into a regular problem for their customers?
I've seen this problem on /r/bestof on reddit - submitting 2011 comments and such, when everyone implicitly assumes comments submitted are present comments.
IMO any sort of news/event post that's not recent (say, in the last month or so, or at least within a year of the posting date) should be required to add a "[2012]" (or whatever year it was posted) to the end of the title.
The Guardian has an interesting article on their approach to this[0] but I'm not sure what the best solution to this globally is. You can't rely on publishers entirely, and yet posters & commenting platforms often have difficulty identifying the dates on posts from certain publications (especially small blogs).
I already was thinking "huh, so maybe the Norwegian case a decade ago was not an outlier", but nope, this is again that same case that was widely reported at the time and seems to continue to resurface at times.
Amazon claims in the article that one should not lose their access to their book library even if their account is blocked.
It's always a bit alienating to me when people suddenly wake up with their stuff taken away and are all like "how could this happen to me? why did noone warn me about this? how could amazon _do this to me_?" and then go off on their ways and "buy" the next movie from them (in addition to the amazon prime membership they already pay for that for some reason only includes the 480p version of the movie). It's not like they haven't been warned that this would happen. At some point, most people experienced some kind of abuse based on subsciption or otherwise questionable licensed service models. yet, they continue to not change a single thing about their behaviour.
I really like ebooks. I like my newfound ability to carry around the novel I'm reading in the form of a pocketbook sized tablet with a matte screen that can be lit with warm orange light if I want it. But I buy all my books directly from the publisher, drm-free. That gives me the right to create as many copies as I want for personal use, makes it legal to integrate it into calibre, make a backup and store it on my ereader all at the same time. Buying from publishers is not hard. It's the second entry on ddg when I search for the book I'm currently reading. They even accept giropay without the need to create an account.
With movies and music I can partially understand the streaming model because the average joe wants much of it, he wants it pre-curated to his taste and he wants it fast, without hassle. This is easy to accomplish with streaming in the drm-hell landscape it has become. But books? He buys a book maybe once every two weeks and the convenience is en par with the garbage dump amazon has set up and much less abusive than that.
I don't think victim-blaming is a great way to educate people on the existence and dangers of DRM. Convenience might even be worth it to some people, but I think it's more often a problem of ignorance. Any TV ad for a Kindle is going to focus on the broad selection and ease of use. Telling those people about the DRM isn't participating in the same conversation that sold them the device.
On the other hand, I dont think victim-blaming is an excuse for rampant and continuous ignorance either. At some point, after getting abused again and again, users are to blame. All this shouldn't suprise any of them, it's in the ToS after all. Some users read the ToS and made an educated choice, some didn't read them and decided to not participate in any business with a company that obfuscates its goals in a 50-page wall of legal damage control, and some just ignore it and use the service. The ones that ignore the ToS and that get caught by suprise later are absolutely to blame for their own neglectance of the contract conditions.
Lots of people aren't victims, they choose to remain ignorant after being warned. Often they don't take the warnings seriously and even insult the person who was just trying to help. They absolutely deserve to be blamed for the results of their choices.
If people don't know I guess I agree, though with the question of: should they have known? If people do know but choose not to consider what may happen, they had that education you mention but disregarded it. I can't feel too sorry for them.
> I don't think victim-blaming is a great way to educate people
The fool me once discussion is always relevant. What is new is the fact that consumer stupidity takes everyone down as well. Without that we wouldn't suffer through this cloud hell.
> I buy all my books directly from the publisher, drm-free
Most publishers don't do that. Why do you think Amazon has DRM? It's not because they enjoy running DRM schemes, they were among the first to sell straight MP3s even. It's because most publishers love DRM. See also the lawsuit against Internet Archive at the first whiff of creaks in the DRM dam.
As I replied to the sister comment, I might be biased because I love science fiction and most science fiction authors are probably somewhat aware what drm is and pick a publisher that fits them not only from a financial standpoint but also the ethical one. This whole comment might've looked different if I'd be a fan of historical fiction, but I don't really feel like finding out.
They sure do enjoy the lock-in that results from publishers demanding DRM.
Books feel like they are in a special class of digital good and I think most people would support legislation ending the use of permanent, proprietary digital locks on books.
> It's not like they haven't been warned that this would happen.
Not only have they not been warned, services like Audible and Kindle are actively marketed to hide that possibility.
If they really wanted people to understand that these purchases can be revoked at any time, they'd stop using words like "own", "buy", and "my library".
It's fine to hold consumers responsible, but only if companies are transparent. "Buy" is a word with a specific definition in the physical world, and Amazon is abusing that understanding.
Pretty sure the fact that they use words like "own", "buy" and "my library" everywhere except the fine print could be used against them in court to argue that they really did "sell" a book and you indeed "own" it, despite what they put in some fine-print.
I stopped buying music on amazon the day their stupid website told me my browser is too dumb to download the MP3 files and I should get chrome instead (using an up to date vivaldi, based on chromium, at most a month or so behind chrome in its feature-set).
It's their right to try ripping me off, but it's disgusting that they don't communicate this. You click "buy now", but somewhere in the small print it says "oh but you're not really buying buying it though". That should be illegal. In fact, pretty sure it is illegal.
Chances are, if someone wanted to spend the thousands if not millions of dollars/euros/pesos/whatever to actually take legal action to demand the content they paid for, it's not unlikely that the decision would fall along the lines of "You can't just effectively sell something and claim you didn't really sell it"
It's like the "It's not monetization I swear, they're just donating and we're giving them something back to show our gratitude" bullshit people pull with Arma 3 servers. Everyone sees through it, but it works as long as nobody has a real interest in actually stopping it.
I noticed that they disabled downloading on mobile as well, when I open a link from amazon to download the music I just bought they told me to download their stupid app and and export from that to my filesystem. After setting it up there was no option to export, so I forced the desktop site with firefox and could download after clicking through two dialouges that tried to convince me that downloading is _really_ not what I want to do. Never bought any media on amazon again after that.
Interesting.. how often can you find the publisher offering a drm free copy? I buy _a lot_ of books (usually one or two per week), and I have a feeling I’d only find 1 in 5 from a publisher but haven’t checked. Also, I always do the “try a sample” first which has saved me a lot of money from buying books that weren’t what I expected. Wish there was an equivalent to that!
I think all book I read in the last three years I bought without drm applied to the files. Most of them have some kind of invisible watermark I couldn't care less about that presumable helps the publisher track down who distributed a book if the user didn't remove it, but it being invisible and probably bit-sized, that's an okay thing in my book (heh).
Now that I think of it, it might have to do with the fact that I read sci-fi almost exclusively, where the authors have some kind of political interest in freedom themselfes and might pick publishers accordingly, but I have no way to back that idea up. The majority of the books I bought are published by Bastei Lübbe (https://www.luebbe.de/), but smaller publishers usually allowed me to do the same.
I don't read book samples because I check the reviews for books I plan on reading on whereever I can find them, but I might start if the reviews start failing me. Might have to figure out where those are possible then :)
Most people trust amazon to be around in 10 years, and do not mind to be bound to a specific company. It would be fine if there was a recourse when getting kicked out of the platform.
This is similar to mail data on gmail, people are aware of the limitations, but are still pissed off when Google shuts down their account without any explanation.
Your point about DRM-free is another form of having a way out of the platform in case of dispute, but there could be other solutions as well I guess.
Yes, I also try to get it directly from the publisher. This has the advantage, that often you get the much better quality PDF version than the Amazon version with garbled math in it. I have bought maybe 5 books for Kindle that I couldn't get any other way. It sucks, because I cannot make these 5 books part of my Calibre library.
Blame structures, intentional structures, not people. People are just buying books the way books are sold. They can go elsewhere is not a reasonable response in amazon's case, considering the % of digital book market do they own?
It's reasonable for the average person to expect stuff to be reaspnable.
I'm okay with this business model. I know it's not a popular opinion here - but as there's no reasonable way to prevent people from unrestrictedly distributing copies, the business model of licensing books sounds reasonable to me.
What's not reasonable is the lack of transparency when you're suspected of abuse. I understand that there are many bad actors, but these companies are judge, jury and executioner when it comes to handling what they think are abuse cases - and honest people who get caught in the crossfire have no recourse.
Regulation needs to be put in place saying that if you paid a company any significant sum for services, you have the right to contest any claims of abuse and must be provided with all reasoning they have on that abuse within 24 hours. And you have a right to take them to court without needing to show damages when they're being unreasonable.
I'd also like to see requirements that companies aren't allowed to use terms like "own" or "buy" when referring to their content. They should have to use a term like "license" or even "borrow" to drive home that you're not paying for unfettered ownership.
I get what you're saying about preventing copying being impossible without DRM, but I think you overestimate the prevalence of unauthorized copying, at least when the convenience and cost of purchasing a legal copy is reasonable enough.
DRM has other bad societal effects, like locking up works beyond their copyright expiration, and causing people to lose access to those works if the company goes out of business (for DRM systems that require periodic license refreshes). DRM also generally disallows all legal copying under fair use terms.
I think the only way that I'd be even remotely comfortable with DRM is if companies using it were required to place their DRM keys in escrow; if the company ever decides to stop offering the service, or simply goes out of business, those keys should be released to the public. And companies should be required to remove DRM from works when its copyright expires. Even with all that, though, I'd still find DRM undesirable.
"I think the only way that I'd be even remotely comfortable with DRM is if companies using it were required to place their DRM keys in escrow;"
Even then, who verifies that the correct keys are uploaded? And for that matter, what counts as "going out of business"? Maybe they'll stop providing service and say "a patch is just around the corner" and then simply never release (or work on) the patch?
I'd also be fine with the T&C's saying "For any reason, we can terminate the services we provide to you, and we will refund any money's paid with interest".
That way, the company can decide to keep the evidence to themselves and not need to go to court, but must forgo all revenue from your account.
If sign a contract that you will provide me a service and you back out of it midway, I'm usually worse off than if you had declined the engagement in advance. For example, if I contract you to build me a house, it takes six months, and three months in you decide to back out and pay me back with interest, I still have half a house I need to demolish or else I have to find someone who would continue your work (which I likely won't find), and I'm out 3 months' rent.
Some variation on this sounds like a good compromise. Both parties need to have some skin in the game but currently that's not true. At the moment terminating an account is a fast and nearly cost-free solution to many thorny account policing issues and therefore a great option for customer service drones.
It's only the occasional "I managed to raise a storm on Twitter so the CEO noticed" that has any cost to the company and thus any chance of getting a resolution.
I’ve bought 100 books on Kindle. You’re saying I could do something that would cause Amazon to decide to break the contract, and I’d get a refund of all 100 books with interest? Seems like a sweet deal to me, since I’m not reading the old books very often.
If you break the rules of the contract what makes you think you get your money back? If you want a refund you should be required to prove that the company was the one that violated the agreement.
A watermark is just about as effective to deter the casual user from distributing their books nilly-willy. I have DRM free ebooks which contain something like "Thanks X Y for buying this book" and so it's blatanly obvious who it belongs to. Now, you could remove it but you could also remove DRM.
Publishers like O'Reilly explicitly don't put DRM on ebooks you buy from them. They also have a subscription library model in parallel. I use both these methods for books from them and I understood the difference. Somehow O'Reilly remains one of the premium and presumably profitable tech book publishers
Indeed, and this is why I still buy paper books, DVDs and CDs (and vinyl, when the mood strikes). Heck, I suspect that in the not-too-distant future, old software licenses and media will be valuable, perhaps extremely so if open-source tools are effectively blocked on the major platforms.
I borrow everything at the local library. If they don't have it, I ask if they can get it. Mostly I just give them the ISBN number and a few days later I get a mail that they reserved it for me, come and pick it up. Almost faster than ordering it myself on the net :-)
Same for me. I will only buy a paper copy of a book, which cannot be removed from my account when it is on my bookshelf. Same for CDs and DVDs. Amazon seems to offer an instant download of mp3s after buying a CD, so often I never even open the CD after receiving it. But having it means I will own it forever.
Anything that is not available in a format I can own in perpetuity, I will not buy. Voting with your wallet is the only way to pressure these companies.
I don't see the interest in buying DVDs. Books and Music are two medium one is likely to revisit. Movies/Drama on the other hand? Once it is viewed, are they really that many people that will try to view it again? Do they get the same thrill as for a very good story/music piece?
This is very subjective, I have rewatched far more DVDs than I have reread books; seems to me that rewatching a good story in movie form isn't much different to rereading a good story in book form? (Typically with less time commitment & effort/imagination required)
I agree. Revisiting old content is the rule, not the exception. If there is stuff you really want to watch again you are very likely to pay for it again. There is a game that I played on PS2 that has been ported to NDS and then PC and I bought all versions even though it was the same game every time.
> if open-source tools are effectively blocked on the major platforms.
Come on, how can you have such a grim outlook? Nobody will “effectively block” open source tools. Consoles can afford to. Phones are being challenged. Everyone else won’t.
I was a long (15years?) paying user of Lastpass, saw the company grow and discussed with the founders when they were just starting. Then the software grew old (and some M&A were dubious)
Switching to Bitwarden was a great choice (since about a year)
(I have no affiliation with Bitwarden, I just work in Information Security and look closely at this kind of software and their tradeoffs)
This is true not just for Kindle books. It's also your games library on Steam and all other similar stores. GOG.com is probably the only online game store where you realy own the stuff you "buy".
Yes, but with Kindle at least you can strip the DRM of your eBooks.
There's a Calibre plugin[1] that does it.
If you really care about ebooks that you purchase, I highly recommend installing this plugin. It automatically strips DRM off books you download and open with Calibre.
And keep a back-up of the (DRM-free) books somewhere that's not Amazon / a cloud. Because a cloud is simply a computer that you do not own.
Well, but that's like saying that you can download cracks for video games, so it's all fine. There are ways to make steam games work without steam, yet I wouldn't consider that to be a solution.
I was going to throw in https://www.humblebundle.com/store, but then I realized that the myriad of various "bundles" that they keep launching nowadays (at least as far as games are concerned) and also their store only sells Steam keys. I think the games in the "Humble Indie Bundles" which come out once or twice a year are still mostly DRM free, but that's about it. You can't even search their store for "DRM free", so I guess that's not a thing there...
HumbleBundle is a classic case of moral decline once institutional priorities overcome the actual mission. It went from "nice idea to support indies and pay-as-you-wish" to just another bargain-price channel for any company, expanding for its own sake.
I don't think it is fair to pin this on steam. Plenty of games on steam run without steam, and require no installation - just copy them over to a different PC. They often come with binaries for all supported OSes at once, so your windows install will work on linux too.
It is the game publishers that choose to use steam drm. Often the same publishers publish on GOG without the drm (since gog, admirably, does not offer a drm option to them), but it is not steam that is forcing the drm on you. Your issue is with the game publisher.
The only game I play of game I'd notice if it where taken away is counter strike global offensive, which wouldn't really run all that well without valve backing it, so I'm okay with that.
Genuine question: why do you consider the linked accounts a trick? I find the single launcher integration quite useful and don't see the privacy loss. Am I missing something?
Amazon.co.uk and its affiliates reserve the right to refuse service, terminate accounts, remove or edit content, or cancel orders at their sole discretion. - Amazon
“If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—forever." - Orwell
I clicked on that link (in Australia) and got "Sorry! Yikes! That story doesn’t exist on Gizmodo Australia, but we have plenty of other great content you can check out here. If you’re still hellbent on that particular story, you can access the US version of Gizmodo here." – I was automatically redirected to
No, not still hellbent thanks Gizmodo, just wanted to go to the link I clicked on, geez, if that's OK. Although after that weird experience, I don't. I thought the story had been deleted, for a moment!
Readit News
This strong difference in powers between companies and customers in the digital realm becomes more and more a serious problem. When people are stop buying digital goods or anything of certain types, just because they have no legal security, then it harms also companies themself. so it should be in their own interesst to support such things.
There was a time in Europe when a strong movement for digital rights existed, but to bad it somehow died down.
If the ebook publishers were motivated to, they would encode unique properties into the text of each download that uniquely identifies the transaction. Then if you find copies online you know who to chase.
The point is, give me my copy of the file, I don't want to be locked into your system.
These shrink wrap licences can be legislated away. Lots of EU countries have consumer protection legislation that explicitly forbids/invalidates such imbalanced or unexpected terms in the fine print for consumer-facing contracts -- or indeed invalidates shrink-wrap licence terms outright.
There is nothing stopping people from buying a 'dumb' e-reader with internal storage where you load epub/pdf/rtf/txt files that you actually own or borrow from a library.
There is a reason that Kindle prevail, and it's not because of some conspiracy or a giant company. It's because it's easy, basically like going to Chapters or Barnes and Noble and walking out with a book. There is no similar avenue for "dumb" e-readers. They need to know several levels of skills to get it and it's a lot more difficult then clicking "Buy" and start reading.
In cases like this where there's a huge imbalance in power and technical knowledge between suppliers and users, I think it's perfectly reasonable for the government to legislate on the behalf of it's constituents to protect their interests.
I think at this point it's been clearly demonstrated that DRM is simply not necessary to protect functioning markets in digital goods. Apple showed this with iTunes, arguing forcefully for DRM free music downloads. I'm a gamer and there's a very vibrant and successful market in DRM free PDFs in the tabletop gaming industry. I'm no extremist, I don't object to all DRM in every case, but I think arbitrary lockouts like this are clearly wrong, and a right to DRM free copies of material you have bought if a service expires or closes is perfectly fair.
Did it? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirate_Party
Deleted Comment
IMO any sort of news/event post that's not recent (say, in the last month or so, or at least within a year of the posting date) should be required to add a "[2012]" (or whatever year it was posted) to the end of the title.
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/help/insideguardian/2019/apr/02/...
Amazon claims in the article that one should not lose their access to their book library even if their account is blocked.
I really like ebooks. I like my newfound ability to carry around the novel I'm reading in the form of a pocketbook sized tablet with a matte screen that can be lit with warm orange light if I want it. But I buy all my books directly from the publisher, drm-free. That gives me the right to create as many copies as I want for personal use, makes it legal to integrate it into calibre, make a backup and store it on my ereader all at the same time. Buying from publishers is not hard. It's the second entry on ddg when I search for the book I'm currently reading. They even accept giropay without the need to create an account.
With movies and music I can partially understand the streaming model because the average joe wants much of it, he wants it pre-curated to his taste and he wants it fast, without hassle. This is easy to accomplish with streaming in the drm-hell landscape it has become. But books? He buys a book maybe once every two weeks and the convenience is en par with the garbage dump amazon has set up and much less abusive than that.
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fixed spelling
> I don't think victim-blaming is a great way to educate people
What would be a better way, specifically?
Most publishers don't do that. Why do you think Amazon has DRM? It's not because they enjoy running DRM schemes, they were among the first to sell straight MP3s even. It's because most publishers love DRM. See also the lawsuit against Internet Archive at the first whiff of creaks in the DRM dam.
They sure do enjoy the lock-in that results from publishers demanding DRM.
Books feel like they are in a special class of digital good and I think most people would support legislation ending the use of permanent, proprietary digital locks on books.
Not only have they not been warned, services like Audible and Kindle are actively marketed to hide that possibility.
If they really wanted people to understand that these purchases can be revoked at any time, they'd stop using words like "own", "buy", and "my library".
It's fine to hold consumers responsible, but only if companies are transparent. "Buy" is a word with a specific definition in the physical world, and Amazon is abusing that understanding.
It's their right to try ripping me off, but it's disgusting that they don't communicate this. You click "buy now", but somewhere in the small print it says "oh but you're not really buying buying it though". That should be illegal. In fact, pretty sure it is illegal.
Chances are, if someone wanted to spend the thousands if not millions of dollars/euros/pesos/whatever to actually take legal action to demand the content they paid for, it's not unlikely that the decision would fall along the lines of "You can't just effectively sell something and claim you didn't really sell it"
It's like the "It's not monetization I swear, they're just donating and we're giving them something back to show our gratitude" bullshit people pull with Arma 3 servers. Everyone sees through it, but it works as long as nobody has a real interest in actually stopping it.
Now that I think of it, it might have to do with the fact that I read sci-fi almost exclusively, where the authors have some kind of political interest in freedom themselfes and might pick publishers accordingly, but I have no way to back that idea up. The majority of the books I bought are published by Bastei Lübbe (https://www.luebbe.de/), but smaller publishers usually allowed me to do the same.
I don't read book samples because I check the reviews for books I plan on reading on whereever I can find them, but I might start if the reviews start failing me. Might have to figure out where those are possible then :)
This is the main complain IMHO.
Most people trust amazon to be around in 10 years, and do not mind to be bound to a specific company. It would be fine if there was a recourse when getting kicked out of the platform.
This is similar to mail data on gmail, people are aware of the limitations, but are still pissed off when Google shuts down their account without any explanation.
Your point about DRM-free is another form of having a way out of the platform in case of dispute, but there could be other solutions as well I guess.
Depending on a range of factors, this might be useful for solving that:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24685279
It's reasonable for the average person to expect stuff to be reaspnable.
I'm okay with this business model. I know it's not a popular opinion here - but as there's no reasonable way to prevent people from unrestrictedly distributing copies, the business model of licensing books sounds reasonable to me.
What's not reasonable is the lack of transparency when you're suspected of abuse. I understand that there are many bad actors, but these companies are judge, jury and executioner when it comes to handling what they think are abuse cases - and honest people who get caught in the crossfire have no recourse.
Regulation needs to be put in place saying that if you paid a company any significant sum for services, you have the right to contest any claims of abuse and must be provided with all reasoning they have on that abuse within 24 hours. And you have a right to take them to court without needing to show damages when they're being unreasonable.
I get what you're saying about preventing copying being impossible without DRM, but I think you overestimate the prevalence of unauthorized copying, at least when the convenience and cost of purchasing a legal copy is reasonable enough.
DRM has other bad societal effects, like locking up works beyond their copyright expiration, and causing people to lose access to those works if the company goes out of business (for DRM systems that require periodic license refreshes). DRM also generally disallows all legal copying under fair use terms.
I think the only way that I'd be even remotely comfortable with DRM is if companies using it were required to place their DRM keys in escrow; if the company ever decides to stop offering the service, or simply goes out of business, those keys should be released to the public. And companies should be required to remove DRM from works when its copyright expires. Even with all that, though, I'd still find DRM undesirable.
Even then, who verifies that the correct keys are uploaded? And for that matter, what counts as "going out of business"? Maybe they'll stop providing service and say "a patch is just around the corner" and then simply never release (or work on) the patch?
That way, the company can decide to keep the evidence to themselves and not need to go to court, but must forgo all revenue from your account.
If sign a contract that you will provide me a service and you back out of it midway, I'm usually worse off than if you had declined the engagement in advance. For example, if I contract you to build me a house, it takes six months, and three months in you decide to back out and pay me back with interest, I still have half a house I need to demolish or else I have to find someone who would continue your work (which I likely won't find), and I'm out 3 months' rent.
I would expect additional compensation.
It's only the occasional "I managed to raise a storm on Twitter so the CEO noticed" that has any cost to the company and thus any chance of getting a resolution.
Why is that a hard requirement though? Also, DRM really doesn't prevent that. I got through my last couple years of college on books from libgen.
Some regulator should take them on that.
Also, USA Supreme Court has no power in the EU. She bought Kindle it in the UK, I guess while they were still part of the EU.
Here is a similar situation with Valve and Steam:
French court rules that Steam’s ban on reselling used games is contrary to European law: https://www.polygon.com/2019/9/19/20874384/french-court-stea...
Anything that is not available in a format I can own in perpetuity, I will not buy. Voting with your wallet is the only way to pressure these companies.
Come on, how can you have such a grim outlook? Nobody will “effectively block” open source tools. Consoles can afford to. Phones are being challenged. Everyone else won’t.
Unfortunately I'll have to migrate to their subscription sooner or later, I already don't have access to their Safari extension.
I was a long (15years?) paying user of Lastpass, saw the company grow and discussed with the founders when they were just starting. Then the software grew old (and some M&A were dubious)
Switching to Bitwarden was a great choice (since about a year)
(I have no affiliation with Bitwarden, I just work in Information Security and look closely at this kind of software and their tradeoffs)
There's a Calibre plugin[1] that does it.
If you really care about ebooks that you purchase, I highly recommend installing this plugin. It automatically strips DRM off books you download and open with Calibre.
And keep a back-up of the (DRM-free) books somewhere that's not Amazon / a cloud. Because a cloud is simply a computer that you do not own.
[1]http://www.geoffstratton.com/remove-drm-amazon-kindle-books
It is the game publishers that choose to use steam drm. Often the same publishers publish on GOG without the drm (since gog, admirably, does not offer a drm option to them), but it is not steam that is forcing the drm on you. Your issue is with the game publisher.
I don't see any compelling reason for me to prefer them over Steam, anymore.
“If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—forever." - Orwell
https://www.gizmodo.com.au/amazon-secretly-removes-1984-from...
No, not still hellbent thanks Gizmodo, just wanted to go to the link I clicked on, geez, if that's OK. Although after that weird experience, I don't. I thought the story had been deleted, for a moment!