8 ms·

Personally I strip the DRM of all the ebooks and movies I buy (not rent of course). Enough with the "bought, but actually renting with an undetermined end date

by m-p-3 3y ago

Personally I strip the DRM of all the ebooks and movies I buy (not rent of course). Enough with the "bought, but actually renting with an undetermined end date".

lrvick 3y ago
Problem with this is it means you are giving money to providers that sell with DRM, that restricts the rights of those not technical enough to circumvent it. Piracy is more ethical than buying DRM media.
- condwanaland 3y ago
  Yes but this also takes money away from the author, who put in a ton of work to make that book. It's not as simple as claiming the piracy is 'ethical' just because it circumvents the publisher
  - Moru 3y ago
    I buy books and music by writing the author and asking them how to pay directly. This ofcourse only works with very small authors so I'm not buying much any more. Reading and watching movies I do from the local library.
    - lxgr 3y ago
      Do you think that the editor, cover art designer, potentially illustrator etc. don’t deserve to get paid? I know at least one author that refuses “out-of-band payments” for that reason. And this is to say nothing about advance payments where the publisher is taking the risk of a book not selling, and the author gets paid regardless, which can be a big thing for small authors too.
  - NoGravitas 3y ago
    I think the idea is that by hurting sales of DRM-ed books relative to DRM-free books, and by increasing the piracy problem only for DRM-ed books, you make it more attractive for publishers to sell DRM-free books, and for authors to apply pressure to their publishers in that direction. Of course, you have to put your money where your mouth is by actually buying books from DRM-free publishers (like Baen and Tor).
  - lrvick 3y ago
    So we should ban libraries, book scanning, and used book sales too?
    - condwanaland 3y ago
      No, because the book was still bought in the first place. In all your examples someone still bought a book which helped ensure the creators of it got paid. Using piracy from the beginning ensures nobody gets paid.
      - lrvick 3y ago
        The book that was scanned and shared with others, was also bought in the first place. Piracy sites are just decentralized libraries.
        condwanaland 3y ago
        Yes, but these secondary markets have been fine because they still require a large primary market. A library can only lend as many copies as it purchases. Someone selling their copy can only sell the copy they purchased. These secondaries are constrained by the primary. Your talking about one person buying a single copy and then distributing it for free in perpetuity. This secondary is not constrained by the primary.
- justsomehnguy 3y ago
  > Piracy is more ethical than buying DRM media. Only if you sent $$ to the author/s.
  - lxgr 3y ago
    And the editor, illustrator and promoters as well. And don't forget to send a larger chunk money to other new prospective authors that you don't know and that haven't even sold a single copy of their book (or maybe not even finished it yet)!
- pipo234 3y ago
  > Problem with this is it means you are giving money to providers that sell with DRM Indeed. And also do not underestimate the cost of adding DRM to media. Don't know about ebooks, but for streaming media I would estimate about half the engineering time spent designing, building and maintaining video work flows is somehow related to CENC, CBCS, Widevine, Playready, Fairplay and the whole ecosystem of third party consultancy around this. For larger platforms these investments are worthwhile, but I don't think it's a coincidence that smaller audio shops and podcasts generally avoid DRM for streaming audio (where margins are smaller than Live/On demand video streaming).
- looping8 3y ago
  How is it more ethical if you don't pay for the product and no money goes to the author? Writers always say that preorders and direct purchases really matter. Of course DRM is bad, but why is piracy ethical in this case?
  - ekianjo 3y ago
    Its ethical as you dont contribute to bad incentives which is the lock down of information behind DRM. Profits motives come after such considerations. We have been living millenia without DRM protection of books so I would wager the justification of their necessity is dubious at best.
  - tap-snap-or-nap 3y ago
    Does the author pay every person they got all their ideas from ? We are talking about very complex one to many relationships that are practically unaccountable.
  - lrvick 3y ago
    Piracy gives the same amount to the author as borrowing from a friend or from the library. It is just more efficient. I 100% always pay for books available without DRM such as from No Starch Press. I encourage any authors reading to consider similarly ethical publishers.
- myaccountonhn 3y ago
  > Piracy is more ethical than buying DRM media. Not buying it nor downloading it illegally would be the ethical stance.
  - ekianjo 3y ago
    Illegality is not an absolute value so it had no place in a discussion about ethics. Many laws are ethically wrong.
    - lxgr 3y ago
      Then let's just call it "acquiring the book in a way that you don't know if the people involved in creating the book would consent to, but have a lot of evidence to suspect that they actually don't".
  - concordDance 3y ago
    From the author's perspective the latter is better (possible word of mouth sales and authoes generally like the idea of people reading and enjoying their writing), so not sure how that works out ethically.
    - myaccountonhn 3y ago
      If it's better for them, I suggest asking for permission first, I'm sure they'll be positive to the idea.
      - concordDance 3y ago
        How would you prove you weren't going to buy it? That's the crucial difference between choosing what you think is right and using an external source, you have access to your thoughts while they don't.
      - lrvick 3y ago
        A lot of the bands I follow openly support people pirating their music at shows, because those people are ticket and merch buying fans. Some bands have been scolded and threatened by their publishers for said public voice, and instead choose silence as they could be sued by their producers/publishers. Creators I have contacted about DRM almost never reply. Likely for similar contractual reasons. They can only legally respond with scolding or silence. I did have one artist I contacted reply once. They were Christian and all but said I would go to hell for sharing copies of someone elses work. I asked how they felt about Jesus replicating and freely sharing someone else's bread and fish. They never replied again.
- alwayslikethis 3y ago
  I wish I can just donate to authors whose books I'm pirating without paying Amazon.
DoingIsLearning 3y ago
I actually bought a bunch of DVDs of my kids' favorite films to burn and have on my NAS. And woah! I completely underestimated how much user hostile anti-piracy tech has grown in the past 20 years . Couldn't even play my DVD, that I bought, with my money, on my computer. Had to install a bunch of libraries to deal with all the file chunking and mangling they do now, just to play a video, not even burning it, just play. Really raised my blood pressure that one.
- Condition1952 3y ago
  Those entrepreneurs are nagging you to look for films online because plastics accumulate forever
- extraduder_ire 3y ago
  What extra odd things could they have done to DVDs that would make them harder to rip? I assume they wouldn't want to break compatibility with existing players. Mainstream DVDs have pretty much always been a collection of .TS files on the disc, best ripped with specialized software. Things like VLC pull in those libraries upon install anyway. Also, I think you mean "rip" rather than "burn", if you mean to copy data from the disc to your machine.
  - DoingIsLearning 3y ago
    Today I learned a fair deal, burn!=rip, and that DVDs have always had chunked .ts files. Definitely had to bring in a bunch of new libs on Debian (still on 'bullseye') to make it work, nothing automagic happened.
- jspizziri 3y ago
  If you haven’t already, you should check out MakeMKV. You can buy it or use it free with the beta keys, and it should solve your problem. https://makemkv.com/ https://makemkv.com/
pierat 3y ago
It's much cheaper and freedom-maintaining if you just pirate. And paying sends the message of "I'm OK with DRM shittified media, abuse me more!" Stripping DRM is also illegal under DMCA. Might as well just pirate and call it a day. Either way you mention leaves you illegal
- southernplaces7 3y ago
  Agreed that torrenting/pirating is practical and simple, but since both downloading pirated books and stripping their DRM are both illegal anyhow, why not learn the minor skills required? After all, somebody somewhere has to post those DRM-stripped books online, so it's at least useful to work on learning the actual trick of doing it instead of depending on others' efforts.
- Qwertious 3y ago
  Also, there's nothing strictly speaking preventing you from mailing $20 to the author of the book you pirated; it's just inconvenient.
  - xbmcuser 3y ago
    I think all authors and other content producers should have sort of a tip jar where we can send them money without someone else taking a big cut. A lot of superfluous charges are put still put for money transfer today so even something like patreon can cost 8-10% of what they recieve. How can they charge such a large percentage on money transfer that is mostly bits.
    - Moru 3y ago
      I believe Ko-fi is not taking a cut but has it's own tip-jar.
    - lxgr 3y ago
      > How can they charge such a large percentage on money transfer that is mostly bits. Because they provide a platform (making content more visible), payment processing (which can be 3% or more for some payment methods), customer support etc. If content producers don't need any of that, they can always have a self-hosted website with their own donation button (or physical mailing address for checks and banknotes, cryptocurrency address etc). > I think all authors and other content producers should have sort of a tip jar That tip jar would cut out everybody else involved in the production of a book and in getting you to even find out about it existing. Every author has the option to self-publish and set their own price (including a "pay-as-you-wish" option), but on the other hand, if they prefer the (relatively) lower risk of going with a traditional publisher, you should also respect that decision and not sidestep that by unilaterally deciding that "oh, I'd prefer you would have made this DRM-free and pay-as-you-wish, here's a check for $20!".
samplatt 3y ago
Was looking at this the other night but didn't have enough skin in the game to reliably blindly-trust external tools to do this for me - I expect that something designed to circumvent encryption is going to come with a very high malware risk. Any resources/tools/tutorials you'd recommend?
- Qwertious 3y ago
  Generally speaking, people use the DeDRM plugin for Calibre. Link omitted for legal reasons.
  - Condition1952 3y ago
    Is it illegal to charge a URL on your country? You might want to try to share a Google search
  - Havoc 3y ago
    Noting that the newer books require additional modules to get around the KFX encryption Even then I’ve found around 5% don’t decrypt
  - southernplaces7 3y ago
    legal reasons? Seriously, has the DRM mafia cowed people so much? What the hell is wrong with sharing public software tools with others? Here's one option you might try (no connection to it but it seems to be one of the most recently usable, trustworthy versions) https://github.com/noDRM/DeDRM_tools https://github.com/noDRM/DeDRM_tools
the__alchemist 3y ago
FYSA for anyone used to this: It doesn't work on Amazon books published in 2023+.
- piperswe 3y ago
  Doesn't it still work if you download the book file for a Kindle from the website, then plug your Kindle serial number into DeDRM?
  - izacus 3y ago
    They've been closing down those loopholes over the years.
- snailmailman 3y ago
  There are workarounds for this change now. I don’t remember the details, but there is a way to strip drm from 2023 books. It’s a relatively recent development I think. Did not even require a physical kindle. (I think for a while the only method did require one)
  - criddell 3y ago
    The workaround for a while was to have an old version of the Kindle for PC software on your computer and download the flies from there. You would get older versions that had crackable DRM. They’ve pretty much closed this loophole. IIRC now you need an older physical Kindle that doesn’t support KFX files and you can download files for that device. It’s still a crappy workaround because the older file format doesn’t have any of the latest typography features.
- themadturk 3y ago
  Yeah, this is what made me abandon Amazon for Kobo.
  - larme 3y ago
    It think this should still work for Kobo ebook?

by m-p-3 3y ago

Personally I strip the DRM of all the ebooks and movies I buy (not rent of course). Enough with the "bought, but actually renting with an undetermined end date".

lrvick 3y ago

Problem with this is it means you are giving money to providers that sell with DRM, that restricts the rights of those not technical enough to circumvent it. Piracy is more ethical than buying DRM media.

condwanaland 3y ago
Yes but this also takes money away from the author, who put in a ton of work to make that book. It's not as simple as claiming the piracy is 'ethical' just because it circumvents the publisher
- Moru 3y ago
  I buy books and music by writing the author and asking them how to pay directly. This ofcourse only works with very small authors so I'm not buying much any more. Reading and watching movies I do from the local library.
  - lxgr 3y ago
    Do you think that the editor, cover art designer, potentially illustrator etc. don’t deserve to get paid? I know at least one author that refuses “out-of-band payments” for that reason. And this is to say nothing about advance payments where the publisher is taking the risk of a book not selling, and the author gets paid regardless, which can be a big thing for small authors too.
- NoGravitas 3y ago
  I think the idea is that by hurting sales of DRM-ed books relative to DRM-free books, and by increasing the piracy problem only for DRM-ed books, you make it more attractive for publishers to sell DRM-free books, and for authors to apply pressure to their publishers in that direction. Of course, you have to put your money where your mouth is by actually buying books from DRM-free publishers (like Baen and Tor).
- lrvick 3y ago
  So we should ban libraries, book scanning, and used book sales too?
  - condwanaland 3y ago
    No, because the book was still bought in the first place. In all your examples someone still bought a book which helped ensure the creators of it got paid. Using piracy from the beginning ensures nobody gets paid.
    - lrvick 3y ago
      The book that was scanned and shared with others, was also bought in the first place. Piracy sites are just decentralized libraries.
      - condwanaland 3y ago
        Yes, but these secondary markets have been fine because they still require a large primary market. A library can only lend as many copies as it purchases. Someone selling their copy can only sell the copy they purchased. These secondaries are constrained by the primary. Your talking about one person buying a single copy and then distributing it for free in perpetuity. This secondary is not constrained by the primary.
justsomehnguy 3y ago
> Piracy is more ethical than buying DRM media. Only if you sent $$ to the author/s.
- lxgr 3y ago
  And the editor, illustrator and promoters as well. And don't forget to send a larger chunk money to other new prospective authors that you don't know and that haven't even sold a single copy of their book (or maybe not even finished it yet)!
pipo234 3y ago
> Problem with this is it means you are giving money to providers that sell with DRM Indeed. And also do not underestimate the cost of adding DRM to media. Don't know about ebooks, but for streaming media I would estimate about half the engineering time spent designing, building and maintaining video work flows is somehow related to CENC, CBCS, Widevine, Playready, Fairplay and the whole ecosystem of third party consultancy around this. For larger platforms these investments are worthwhile, but I don't think it's a coincidence that smaller audio shops and podcasts generally avoid DRM for streaming audio (where margins are smaller than Live/On demand video streaming).
looping8 3y ago
How is it more ethical if you don't pay for the product and no money goes to the author? Writers always say that preorders and direct purchases really matter. Of course DRM is bad, but why is piracy ethical in this case?
- ekianjo 3y ago
  Its ethical as you dont contribute to bad incentives which is the lock down of information behind DRM. Profits motives come after such considerations. We have been living millenia without DRM protection of books so I would wager the justification of their necessity is dubious at best.
- tap-snap-or-nap 3y ago
  Does the author pay every person they got all their ideas from ? We are talking about very complex one to many relationships that are practically unaccountable.
- lrvick 3y ago
  Piracy gives the same amount to the author as borrowing from a friend or from the library. It is just more efficient. I 100% always pay for books available without DRM such as from No Starch Press. I encourage any authors reading to consider similarly ethical publishers.
myaccountonhn 3y ago
> Piracy is more ethical than buying DRM media. Not buying it nor downloading it illegally would be the ethical stance.
- ekianjo 3y ago
  Illegality is not an absolute value so it had no place in a discussion about ethics. Many laws are ethically wrong.
  - lxgr 3y ago
    Then let's just call it "acquiring the book in a way that you don't know if the people involved in creating the book would consent to, but have a lot of evidence to suspect that they actually don't".
- concordDance 3y ago
  From the author's perspective the latter is better (possible word of mouth sales and authoes generally like the idea of people reading and enjoying their writing), so not sure how that works out ethically.
  - myaccountonhn 3y ago
    If it's better for them, I suggest asking for permission first, I'm sure they'll be positive to the idea.
    - concordDance 3y ago
      How would you prove you weren't going to buy it? That's the crucial difference between choosing what you think is right and using an external source, you have access to your thoughts while they don't.
    - lrvick 3y ago
      A lot of the bands I follow openly support people pirating their music at shows, because those people are ticket and merch buying fans. Some bands have been scolded and threatened by their publishers for said public voice, and instead choose silence as they could be sued by their producers/publishers. Creators I have contacted about DRM almost never reply. Likely for similar contractual reasons. They can only legally respond with scolding or silence. I did have one artist I contacted reply once. They were Christian and all but said I would go to hell for sharing copies of someone elses work. I asked how they felt about Jesus replicating and freely sharing someone else's bread and fish. They never replied again.
alwayslikethis 3y ago
I wish I can just donate to authors whose books I'm pirating without paying Amazon.

DoingIsLearning 3y ago

I actually bought a bunch of DVDs of my kids' favorite films to burn and have on my NAS. And woah! I completely underestimated how much user hostile anti-piracy tech has grown in the past 20 years . Couldn't even play my DVD, that I bought, with my money, on my computer. Had to install a bunch of libraries to deal with all the file chunking and mangling they do now, just to play a video, not even burning it, just play. Really raised my blood pressure that one.

Condition1952 3y ago
Those entrepreneurs are nagging you to look for films online because plastics accumulate forever
extraduder_ire 3y ago
What extra odd things could they have done to DVDs that would make them harder to rip? I assume they wouldn't want to break compatibility with existing players. Mainstream DVDs have pretty much always been a collection of .TS files on the disc, best ripped with specialized software. Things like VLC pull in those libraries upon install anyway. Also, I think you mean "rip" rather than "burn", if you mean to copy data from the disc to your machine.
- DoingIsLearning 3y ago
  Today I learned a fair deal, burn!=rip, and that DVDs have always had chunked .ts files. Definitely had to bring in a bunch of new libs on Debian (still on 'bullseye') to make it work, nothing automagic happened.
jspizziri 3y ago
If you haven’t already, you should check out MakeMKV. You can buy it or use it free with the beta keys, and it should solve your problem. https://makemkv.com/ https://makemkv.com/

pierat 3y ago

It's much cheaper and freedom-maintaining if you just pirate. And paying sends the message of "I'm OK with DRM shittified media, abuse me more!" Stripping DRM is also illegal under DMCA. Might as well just pirate and call it a day. Either way you mention leaves you illegal

southernplaces7 3y ago
Agreed that torrenting/pirating is practical and simple, but since both downloading pirated books and stripping their DRM are both illegal anyhow, why not learn the minor skills required? After all, somebody somewhere has to post those DRM-stripped books online, so it's at least useful to work on learning the actual trick of doing it instead of depending on others' efforts.
Qwertious 3y ago
Also, there's nothing strictly speaking preventing you from mailing $20 to the author of the book you pirated; it's just inconvenient.
- xbmcuser 3y ago
  I think all authors and other content producers should have sort of a tip jar where we can send them money without someone else taking a big cut. A lot of superfluous charges are put still put for money transfer today so even something like patreon can cost 8-10% of what they recieve. How can they charge such a large percentage on money transfer that is mostly bits.
  - Moru 3y ago
    I believe Ko-fi is not taking a cut but has it's own tip-jar.
  - lxgr 3y ago
    > How can they charge such a large percentage on money transfer that is mostly bits. Because they provide a platform (making content more visible), payment processing (which can be 3% or more for some payment methods), customer support etc. If content producers don't need any of that, they can always have a self-hosted website with their own donation button (or physical mailing address for checks and banknotes, cryptocurrency address etc). > I think all authors and other content producers should have sort of a tip jar That tip jar would cut out everybody else involved in the production of a book and in getting you to even find out about it existing. Every author has the option to self-publish and set their own price (including a "pay-as-you-wish" option), but on the other hand, if they prefer the (relatively) lower risk of going with a traditional publisher, you should also respect that decision and not sidestep that by unilaterally deciding that "oh, I'd prefer you would have made this DRM-free and pay-as-you-wish, here's a check for $20!".

samplatt 3y ago

Was looking at this the other night but didn't have enough skin in the game to reliably blindly-trust external tools to do this for me - I expect that something designed to circumvent encryption is going to come with a very high malware risk. Any resources/tools/tutorials you'd recommend?

Qwertious 3y ago
Generally speaking, people use the DeDRM plugin for Calibre. Link omitted for legal reasons.
- Condition1952 3y ago
  Is it illegal to charge a URL on your country? You might want to try to share a Google search
- Havoc 3y ago
  Noting that the newer books require additional modules to get around the KFX encryption Even then I’ve found around 5% don’t decrypt
- southernplaces7 3y ago
  legal reasons? Seriously, has the DRM mafia cowed people so much? What the hell is wrong with sharing public software tools with others? Here's one option you might try (no connection to it but it seems to be one of the most recently usable, trustworthy versions) https://github.com/noDRM/DeDRM_tools https://github.com/noDRM/DeDRM_tools

the__alchemist 3y ago

FYSA for anyone used to this: It doesn't work on Amazon books published in 2023+.

piperswe 3y ago
Doesn't it still work if you download the book file for a Kindle from the website, then plug your Kindle serial number into DeDRM?
- izacus 3y ago
  They've been closing down those loopholes over the years.
snailmailman 3y ago
There are workarounds for this change now. I don’t remember the details, but there is a way to strip drm from 2023 books. It’s a relatively recent development I think. Did not even require a physical kindle. (I think for a while the only method did require one)
- criddell 3y ago
  The workaround for a while was to have an old version of the Kindle for PC software on your computer and download the flies from there. You would get older versions that had crackable DRM. They’ve pretty much closed this loophole. IIRC now you need an older physical Kindle that doesn’t support KFX files and you can download files for that device. It’s still a crappy workaround because the older file format doesn’t have any of the latest typography features.
themadturk 3y ago
Yeah, this is what made me abandon Amazon for Kobo.
- larme 3y ago
  It think this should still work for Kobo ebook?