[A2k] DMCA used to curb competition (surprise, surprise)

[Pranesh Prakash]

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With this, Amazon joins the ranks of garage door opener manufacturers
(Chamberlain), printer companies (Lexmark), portable music player
producers (Apple, with its FairPlay DRM system).  As Richard Esguerre of
EFF put it, DRMs are all about "eliminating legitimate competition,
hobbling interoperability, and creating de facto technology monopolies".

That apart, MobileRead seems to be the e-book equivalent of Doom9 and
HydrogenAudio.

Regards,
Pranesh

From: <http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-10196424-38.html>
See also: <http://news.cnet.com/8301-13580_3-9838934-39.html>
+-------+
March 13, 2009 8:00 PM PDT


  Amazon invokes DMCA against Kindle e-books from other vendors

by Declan McCullagh <http://www.cnet.com/profile/declan00/>

MobileRead.com posted a letter this week that Amazon.com apparently sent
regarding alleged copyright violations. This is an excerpt.

When President Clinton signed the Digital Millennium Copyright Act into
law 11 years ago, he predicted
<http://www.dfc.org/dfc1/Archives/wipo/presidn.html> it will "protect
from digital piracy the copyright industries that comprise the leading
export of the United States."

The DMCA turned out to be much broader than that. This week, an e-book
Web site said Amazon.com invoked the 1998 law to prevent books from some
non-Amazon sources from working on its Kindle reader
<http://reviews.cnet.com/e-book-readers/amazon-kindle-2/4505-3508_7-33517190.html>.


Amazon sent a legal notice to MobileRead.com complaining that
information relating to a computer utility written in the Python
programming language "constitutes a violation" of the DMCA, according to
a copy of the warning letter
<http://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=41929> that the site
posted. MobileRead.com is an e-book news and community site.

MobileRead.com forum moderator Alexander Turcic said in a post on
Thursday that although he did not believe the program violated the law,
the site would "voluntarily follow their request and remove links and
detailed instructions related to it." Turcic said that, contrary to
Amazon's claim, his site never "hosted" the software.

Amazon did not respond to a request for comment on Friday.

The author of the software in question, titled Kindlepid.py, is listed
as Igor Skochinsky, a hardware hacker who performed a remarkable
analysis <http://news.cnet.com/8301-13580_3-9838934-39.html> of the
Kindle and described in December 2007 how he was able to gain access
<http://igorsk.blogspot.com/2007/12/hacking-kindle-part-3-root-shell-and.html>
to the device.

It's unclear why Amazon waited so long to respond with a legal threat,
and why the company targeted MobileRead.com: Skochinsky's original blog
post
<http://igorsk.blogspot.com/2007/12/mobipocket-books-on-kindle.html>
about Kindlepid.py is dated December 2007, and the copy of the
Kindlepid.py software hosted at the Googlepages.com Web-page posting
site is still available for download at
http://skochinsky.googlepages.com/azw-0.2.zip.

Kindlepid.py and a related piece of accompanying Python code don't allow
piracy. Rather, they accomplish something akin to the opposite: they
allow legally purchased books from other e-book stores to be used on the
Kindle. (Amazon owns MobiPocket, one of those stores. Another would be
OverDrive.com <http://www.overdrive.com/>, which counts schools and
libraries as customers.)

In theory, at least, this could threaten Amazon's business model, which
provides wireless connectivity through Sprint's EV-DO cellular data
network and covers the cost through items purchased from the Amazon
Kindle Store
<http://www.amazon.com/kindle-store-ebooks-newspapers-blogs/b?ie=UTF8&node=133141011>.
Kindle customers can also e-mail themselves documents to be converted at
10 cents per conversion
<http://download.cnet.com/8301-2007_4-10187502-12.html>.

A copy of a MobileRead.com wiki page
<http://wiki.mobileread.com/wiki/KindlePID_Mac>--now empty--saved
<http://74.125.95.132/search?q=cache:xH0j9wdpW3wJ:wiki.mobileread.com/wiki/KindlePID_Mac+http://wiki.mobileread.com/wiki/KindlePID_Mac&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us&client=firefox-a>
in Google's cache says Kindlepid.py allows you 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." It provides instructions on how to install and use the
software.

MobileRead.com readers with Kindles were not pleased with Amazon. "What
this script does is make the Kindle more useful," wrote
<http://www.mobileread.com/forums/showpost.php?p=390455&postcount=6> one
reader. "With Amazon using the DMCA to get rid of this, they are
alienating their customers and causing prospective customers to purchase
a different device."

And the Kindlefix.py code is already being mirrored, including in a post
<http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1158727&cid=27172053> on
Slashdot.org.

Section 1201 <http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?c105:H.R.2281.ENR:>
of the DMCA says: "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."

One exception to the DMCA's general rule, however, comes a few
paragraphs later. It says circumvention is permissible for
"interoperability" of computer programs, with interoperability defined
as the "ability of computer programs to exchange information, and of
such programs mutually to use the information which has been exchanged."

If Amazon were to press its case against Kindlefix.py, another legal
claim could involve reverse engineering, which is prohibited by the
Kindle terms of use
<http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=200144530&#content>.
They say users may not "circumvent any of the functions or protections
of the Device or Software or any mechanisms operatively linked to the
Software, including, but not limited to, augmenting or substituting any
digital rights management functionality of the Device or Software."

This isn't the only legal spat that's arisen over the Kindle 2. Last
month, the Authors Guild claimed
<http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-10161104-93.html> that the mechanical
text-to-speech converter was a violation of copyright law.

--
Pranesh Prakash
Programme Manager
Centre for Internet and Society

T: +91 80 40926283
W: http://cis-india.org


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