Amazon uses DMCA against other Kindle e-book suppliers
Amazon has taken legal action to keep a number of Internet sources from supplying users of the Kindle e-book reader with non-Amazon-produced electronic books.
According to one of the vendors named by Amazon, the giant book vendor has invoked the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) against at least one vendor. The vendor, MobileRead.com, published a letter received from Amazon attorneys on their Web site. The letter received and published by MobileRead states that usage information on the MobileRead site relating to a computer utility written in the Python programming language “constitutes a violation” of the DMCA.
The utility in question, which was written by Igor Skochinsky in 2007, allows Kindle users to use e-books from vendors other than Amazon to be used on the Kindle device. Skochinsky is a hardware hacker who famously gained access to the Kindle by analyzing the device electronics. The software, known as Kindlepid.py, simply allows a Kindle owner to place non-Amazon e-books on their Kindle readers.
For its part, MobileRead.com forum moderator Alexander Turcic has written that that although he does not believe the program violates any law, including the DCMA, the site would “voluntarily follow their request and remove links and detailed instructions related to it.” MobileRead says that they never hosted the utility on their site. The utility is available on googlepages.com, and is already being mirrored elsewhere, as reported in a CNET story.
A Google cached copy of a MobileRead.com Wiki page, show that the page (which in now empty) once said that the Kindlepid.py utility allows the user to “obtain books from sites that use DRM (Digital Rights Management – encryption) on their books for specific devices. This includes book sellers and public libraries.” The page in question, before it was made blank, provided instructions on how to obtain, install, and use Kindlepid.py.
As for the invocation of the DCMA, it is believed that the portion of the law being invoked is Section 1201, which states, “No person shall… offer to the public, provide, or otherwise traffic in any technology… is primarily designed or produced for the purpose of circumventing a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title.”
It should be noted that the DCMA, a few sections later, provide an exception to Section 1201. The latter section allows such circumvention if it advances the cause of interoperability, and then goes on to define interoperability as “the ability of computer programs to exchange information, and of such programs mutually to use the information which has been exchanged.”
This latter section seems to define fairly precisely the function of Kindlepid.py. As always, the legal battle (if there is one) will be fought in the fine print and definition contested by the parties. It is possible that Kindlepid.py could threaten the Amazon business plan for the Kindle. Or, as some Kindle users have stated, it is possible that Kindlepid.py just makes the Kindle a more useful device without harming Amazon at all. From the point of view of the user, it just seems sad that everything in modern life seems to involve a courtroom battle over who gets the money.
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March 14th, 2009
Reminds me of the whole situation with jailbreaking iPhones. Amazon would sell even more Kindles if there were no restrictions in place – but of course they don’t see it that way.
November 1st, 2011
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