4 ms·
> Personally I don't care about Amazon. But I do care about the precedent set when it comes to distributing applications that make doing something legal easier
by jplayer01 7y ago
> Personally I don't care about Amazon. But I do care about the precedent set when it comes to distributing applications that make doing something legal easier (at near zero cost). I personally don't even prefer the argument they use and don't even think it works that great as an argument (because it doesn't work if you replace the AI with a person hired to do the same job).
I'd say if this were an open source project created by some volunteers because they were genuinely of the opinion that this provided value to people, and it would in the same way that DeDRM is, there'd be no problem.
> It is my understanding that the user's device does the translation
It's Amazon doing this for financial gain, integrating it into their app with which people consume audiobooks bought through their platform, based on licenses they legally acquired that presumably don't allow this use. I don't see any context in which this is okay. We can't excuse anti-competitive behavior just because if you do the right amount of twisting it seems okay and they found a neat way to skirt contractual and financial obligations. I'd say most significant issue is the scale. They're essentially providing automation of creating unlicensed copies for everybody on their platform and presumably will have a significant impact on the original copyright holders. Which simply wouldn't be the case for an open source project (the amount of people who use DeDRM is miniscule).