Comment on Amazon Prime Video is able to remove a video from your library after purchase.
archomrade@midwest.social 11 months agoI do the same with DVD’s and blue-ray. Frankly, I think digital ‘purchases’ should be included in that fair-use exception, even if that hasn’t been tested in court. I don’t think it’s been established that digital media qualifies under the fair-use exception of stripping DRM, since each distributor also has a ToS that specifies the ‘legal’ arrangement of the purchase. I would hope those ToS’s would not stand in court against existing DMCA precedent, but I don’t have a lot of confidence.
If they were to ever officially disallow it, I think piracy would be 100% morally justified.
GeekyNerdyNerd@sh.itjust.works 11 months ago
Yeah if nodrm is ever killed by a DMCA action I’d be turning to my local library and Zlibrary (or whatever the closest alternative is today l don’t know if Zlibrary still exists or not) exclusively.
If the book publishers are smart they won’t kill drm stripping software as nobody who strips drm is gonna keep buying ebooks if they can’t do that, the people that don’t care already just buy their ebooks because it’s stupidly convenient compared to piracy, and often not that expensive anyway.
archomrade@midwest.social 11 months ago
No argument here, except with ebooks i think there’s little in the way of alternatives if they kill the ability to strip drm. There are simply too many books to reasonably distribute pirated copies if only a handful of people know how to do it. At least with video media there’s easily rippable DVD formats, but with books there’s basically no reasonable way to create an ebook from a hardcopy.
If they kill ebook drm removers I think they’d be largely successful in increasing ebook sales. There’d be a fair number of people who would return to renting from a library, and even fewer that would resort to piracy, but largely I think normal people would continue buying ebooks.
Don’t tell them i said that though.
nybble41@programming.dev 11 months ago
On the contrary, tons of books have been digitized from hard copies through a combination of OCR and manual editing. (E.g.: Project Gutenberg.) The same basic process works for both printed books and pages displayed on an e-reader. It’s quite tedious but not exactly difficult. Anyone with a smartphone can submit usable scans, though some simple DIY equipment speeds up the process and improves the quality, and OCR is getting better all the time.
In the worst case the book can simply be retyped. People used to copy books by hand after all, using nothing more sophisticated than pen/quill and paper/parchment/papyrus. Unlike in those days the manual effort is only needed once per title, not per copy.
archomrade@midwest.social 11 months ago
I’m aware of the digitization projects, but not many people have automatic OCR machines in their basement, and manually flipping the page on your scanner is a little impractical for anything more than a 10 page pamphlet 😅
There’s no PRACTICAL way to digitize hardcopies for the average Pirate willing to break copyright law
GeekyNerdyNerd@sh.itjust.works 11 months ago
I’m 99% sure it won’t have much of a positive impact in sales simply because the majority of ebook buyers don’t care about DRM anyway, only the minority of us bother to strip DRM. So while it wouldn’t be a large drop in sales I do think it would still be a drop. It might not be enough of a loss for them to care, and tbh as you said it would probably only result in a mild increase in piracy while the majority either do library loans or switch to paper.
I don’t think that those of us who care enough to jump through the hoops to strip DRM are just gonna roll-over and accept that the publishers can yoink our entire libraries whenever they see fit, but I do admit most don’t care, but those that don’t care aren’t stripping DRM anyway, they are just relying on the ability to redownload their books whenever they wish from Amazon/Kobo/Nook.