Kindle targeted by Defective by Design

You may have heard in the news recently that Amazon is removing features and user generated content from books on their Kindle 2 reader. While many hail devices such as the Kindle as the best thing to come out for lovers of books since the printing press, Amazon has had to deal with some negative responses from publishers. First they disabled the “read aloud” feature on some books without so much as a “do you mind” to Kindle owners, next they sent books that some users had purchased to the Great Bit Bucket in the Sky(as Peng calls it). They’ve even deleted one reader’s personal notes on a book. The fact that one of the books concerned is George Orwell’s masterpiece 1984 makes it both really sad and kind of funny in  a dark comedic sense.

Peng brought us information on a protest from Defective By Design against the Digital Rights Management (DRM) being used by the Boston Public Librarylast year, and when he sent me a link to a petition asking Amazon to stop controlling their customer’s rights in regard to the Kindle, I asked him to post it here. Unfortunately he’s had yet more problems with his computer this week, which turned out to be just a flaky video cable, and he asked me to blog it instead.

Please consider signing the petitionon Defective By Design’s website asking Jeff Bezos and Amazon.com to stop bowing to pressure from corporate interests and take a stand for the rights of the consumer, especially since the consumer is parting with so much disposable income to buy the Kindle and books to read on it. As the survey puts it,

Whatever Amazon’s reasons for imposing this control may be, they are not as important as the public’s freedom to use books without interference or supervision.

Peng and I look forward to being able to bring you news of success in this battle with yet another form of DRM.

And Peng? I think we need to get you a new comp for Chrismukkuh. The one you have now sure seems like a gift of someone else’s problems, and it sucks that you have to deal with issues so often.  Perhaps we can set up a way to get donations from our readers to help pay for it, since it seems you’re giving us so much valuable information.

xkcd: Steal This Comic

It’s rare that I’ll pull something completely from another site, but in this case I think I’ll make an exception.

This is why I like getting music from Amazon’s MP3 store. All of their music is in MP3 with absolutely no DRM lock-in. And because there’s no DRM I can buy songs with Linux (or use my Pepsi Points to get them), something I can’t say about their on demand video store.

Why I won’t be following the Olympics on NBC this year

Last night NBC showed their coverage of the opening ceremonies for the Beijing Olympics. Unfortunately my roomies hate sports and see not reason to watch even the spectacle of the opening and closing ceremonies, so we were watching “Be Cool” on AMC instead of the Olympics. I had seen NBC was setting a new standard with coverage reaching not only across the full range of NBC Universal stations (except for SciFi, thankfully) but also including streaming coverage and highlights on their website. So I figured this morning I’d go to the site and see what kind of streaming video they have of the opening ceremonies. That’s when I saw this screen:

The translation? “Oh, you use Linux? We won’t show you any of our video content because we can’t use our DRM wrappers for your operating system. Sucks to be you.”

Don’t get me wrong, I understand that NBC has paid a hell of a lot of money to get the rights to broadcast the Olympics here in the States, and they want to make sure people don’t use Linux (and it’s DRM-free “world”) to snag the videos and post them to file sharing networks and torrent sites to let people all over the world see their coverage. Although if their talking heads run off at the mouth as much as they usually do people would much rather use video content from a source that lets the imagery and action speak for itself.

I understand they have to protect their investment, but to completely lock out all users of an open source operating system? Give me a break. I’d send NBC a thank you email for locking me out, but I don’t see any feedback link and I’m sure as hell not registering with that site just to be able to let them know how disappointed I am that they’re treating all Linux users as if we’re content thieves who can’t wait to capture their video stream so they can post it to LimeWire.

So I’ve decided I’ll just get my Olympics coverage from other sources, even if it means I don’t get a chance to see video coverage. Including never seeing exactly what the cauldron looked like after reading about it from online news sources yesterday. Luckily I’d stopped getting my local news from the local NBC affil (and their love for flash over substance) and went back to getting my news from our local Eye web station.

I’m really regretting that I like so many NBC shows that care coming back this fall.I’d really like to be able to reward them for shutting us Linux users our during the Olympics by returning the favor when the new season starts. Granted one person won’t make any difference in the ratings, but I’d also be one less person viewing their ads and buying the products presented during the commercial breaks.

Just please don’t get me started on the heavy handed product placement during this season’s Eureka. I hate it so much that I’m finding a new deodorant to use when my current supply runs out since the brand I use is a sister brand to a major sponsor of this year’s Eureka.

Peng’s links for Monday, 28 July

Can you believe it’s almost August? Dang the seasons (other than maybe winter) are flying by more and more. I’m sure it’s not technology’s fault.

• Alan Pope: Demented by Design. While I support the anti-DRM work of Defective by Design, their latest effort will probably mean more people within the Mac community, especially people who work and use the Genius Bar, will like the open source community even more. +1, Alan.
• Scott Ritchie: Wine should “embrace and extend” the Microsoft Installer format. Scott has a great idea, but I wonder how well it would work in real world code. If it can work it would be a great way to help more people move to open source operating systems.
• Juan Carlos Torres: KDE 4.1: Good enough for ME. Juan Carlos give a great preview of some of the goodies coming in the new “dot release” for KDE, due tomorrow. It looks nice enough it almost makes me want to install KDE 4 on my Ubuntu box so I can take it for a test drive. Too bad I’m not sure how all of my goodies like AWN and Do, let alone Mac4Lin, would play with it.
• Mark Shuttleworth: Economic clustering and Free Software release coordination. Back in April our favorite spaceman suggested that open source devs should release most of their new versions the same day to boost the press that open source projects get. He was speaking at the Linux Symposium on Friday and great feedback on his idea. The comparison to car manufacturers that he relates really helps illustrate what he’s trying to say.

Before I close I have to pass along a picture I saw yesterday.

I can only think of two words that express how I feel about this picture. Hell. Yeah. I don’t think I could have said it better myself.

Protest DRM at the BPL tomorrow

The Boston Public Library has opened part of it’s collection of books, music and movies to users over the Internet, but only if you can utilize Microsoft’s Digital Rights Management system, meaning Mac OSX and Linux users are effectively blocked from using these library resources. But a protest has been put together by free software and anti-DRM activists to let the BPL that this places unfair restrictions on its users.

You may be able to burn your own DVD movies leagally

A new technology hs been announced to allow you to legally burn your own movies DVDs on your computer without the fear of getting busted for breaking the law.