Comments on: Kindle's DRM Hacked. The Beginning of the end?

By: John

John — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 17:33:22 +0000

I agree. DRM is just a way of frustrating legit customers while giving hackers something to play with. If I buy an ebook, I should be able to read anywhere I choose (I should also be able to lend and sell it but that is another issue). Limiting me is not the way to make/keep me as a happy customer.

People who make their decisions from fear usually make bad decisions and the publishing industry is no different. Notice the recent news that those who pirate music online end up spending more money annually purchasing music than those who don’t pirate music.

The issue is not protecting yourself from the crooks. The issue is getting more people to know about what you have to offer so they will pay to access it.

Nobody wants authors to work for free but crippling what we are buying is not the solution. It’s like flattening the tires on a new car so the customer cannot drive to another dealer.

By: Zeke

Zeke — Sun, 27 Dec 2009 20:03:56 +0000

Hopefully what “Amazon will learn,” or more accurately, what the publishers must learn, is that DRM is NOT a tool against piracy. Lets look at the details…

1. DRM is usually easy to break.
2. Printed book and Audio-CD have been pirated long before DRM (those methods still exist)
3. Nothing stops a pirate from getting what they want except lack-of-availability.

What is DRM? It is a tool to limit what the end-user can use the purchase for. The publisher doesn’t want text-to-speech enabled because they also sell the Audiobook for $50? DRM. Amazon doesn’t want the file used on a Sony E-Reader? DRM.

I think in the end we’ll find that DRM is neither desired by the end user, useful in stopping piracy, nor entirely legal. I also think we’ll find that the removal of DRM is perfectly legal for personal use.

By: P. Rad

P. Rad — Thu, 24 Dec 2009 14:11:17 +0000

You are absolutely right Tom. Nothing’s unbreakable. Amazon will learn. Let’s see if things change with Kindle 3

By: Tom

Tom — Thu, 24 Dec 2009 08:46:25 +0000

There are two things to understand here.

1) Amazon’s DRM was broken a while ago, this isn’t new news.

2) Unbreakable DRM is theoretically impossible. If you give someone encrypted data, unless it’s encrypted with a “one time pad”, a method unfeasible for DRM application, the person can eventually break the key. If you expect them to be able to view the data (such as reading the ebook) it’s worse, because that means they MUST ALREADY HAVE the key, you’re just hoping the key will remain hidden from them. Consequently, DRM isn’t really a method for preventing access to the raw data or preventing the copying of the data, it’s just a method of making these things inconvenient.

Apple’s people are smart enough to understand these things, so they must have used DRM only because the studios made them do so in order to sell music. I’m sure Amazon’s people are smart enough to realize the futility of DRM as well, so I’m confident that Kindle’s books, like Apple’s music, will go DRM-free as soon as Amazon is able to get the publishers to wake up and smell the futility of DRM.

By: Chris

Chris — Wed, 23 Dec 2009 13:44:41 +0000

Wow, I really can't believe how this story has spread. It's like the phone game. The actual news being completely lost. Kindle DRM was hacked long ago. The 'news' is that he was able to get the kindle pid out of kindle for pc, so you don't have to own a kindle to buy kindle books and strip the DRM. I am surprised that a kindle blog is parroting this incorrect information. And bbc? It just goes to show how little background checking is done these days. It only took me a few minutes of searching to get to the bottom of this, couldn't news sites be expected to do at least that much?