Amazon Kindle looks to DMCA to block the use of a subsidiary's e-books

Stephen Withers
Monday, 16 March 2009 11:18

IT Industry - Strategy

MobileRead's Alexander Turcic said "due to the vagueness of the DMCA law and our intention to remain in good relation with Amazon, to voluntarily follow their request and remove links and detailed instructions related to it."

It's not as if Amazon is treading completely new ground. Trying to stop people using content that wasn't purchased from Amazon on a Kindle is much the same as Apple talking about using the DMCA to stop people running software that wasn't purchased from the App Store on their iPhones.

There seems to be some question of whether the DMCA actually applies in this situation, but the Electronic Frontier Foundation - backed by Skype and Mozilla - has called on the US Copyright Office to rule that jailbreaking iPhones and other handsets is explicitly exempted from the DMCA.

If that gains further support, it would be logical to extend the idea to encompass steps needed to allow the use of any content (including software) on any device capable of using it providing any DRM controls are maintained.

After all, wasn't the DMCA supposed to benefit content providers, not the people that sell players?

Since Mobipocket is an Amazon company, the issue around kindlepid.py and kindlefix.py clearly isn't one of content rights - especially as there doesn't seem to be anything in the Mobipocket terms of trade about using the ebooks on any particular devices.

Amazon recently copped some flack from book publishers over the Kindle's text-to-speech capability. Even though the company maintained the feature was legal, it has modified its systems so rightsholders can enable or disable text-to-speech on a per-title basis.

And earlier this month, Amazon released a Kindle reader application for the iPod and iPhone that includes bookmark synchronisation between devices.