[SWLUG] Kindle Warning?

[Neil Jones]

On 16/11/2010 16:33, Sam Radion wrote:
>
>
> On Mon, Nov 15, 2010 at 1:09 PM, Neil Jones <neil at nwjones.demon.co.uk 
> <mailto:neil at nwjones.demon.co.uk>> wrote:
>
>     Hi folks,
>
>     I have no intention of getting a kindle.
>
>
> Then why is it a worry for you?
>
>     I'm sorry but I'm not privatising the contents of my mind like
>     this. It
>     sounds daft to me.
>
>
> But you wouldn't be as you have no intention of buying one.
>
> Aside from the fact that Amazon trying to sue you for knowing 
> something is so unlikely as to be almost impossible, I think there are 
> far better things to spend mental effort on than a £150 gadget you are 
> not going to  buy.
>
Whether you see this as a problem depends on how well you see 
possibilities as I have said.

At the moment this is not a problem for me but what happens in the 
future when other people who don't see the problems of Digital 
Restrictions Management all have kindles , or devices with similarly 
strange and authoritarian restrictions on them, and have used them so 
much that some things are no longer available unless you have an 
electronic device.

It may be that those who interpret the word commercial as you cannot 
sell your kindle with the books on it but it that were the case the
wording would surely be "non-transferable" not non commercial.

Again ignoring possibilities  people may ask how are Amazon going to 
know. Well for a start we don't know how, after all this catches on, the 
internet will develop, but you can already discriminate many company 
download sites from domestic ones just by IP address.
People think they are buying the books. They are not. They are licencing 
their use, and at any time Amazon or someone who buys/ acquires part
of their business can enforce things the way they chose to and YOU then 
have to have the resources to tackle them.
You can bet an awful lot of people don't properly appreciate the difference.

This is a fundamental problem with Digital Restrictions Management and 
it especially applies to things you want to keep and own
for a long period.

As Thomas Jefferson wrote "The price of liberty is eternal vigilance"  I 
have been here before when a corporate take-over found me working for a 
new company whose contracts claimed the copyright to anything and 
everything we did , work related or not. most people were not bothered.
I was as was a person who wrote professionally as a side line. Owning 
the copyright to something means that you control its expression.
In theory I could not write the websites I now do without asking 
permission or even write to my MP to complain about it. :-)
Because no-one  else was vigilant about their liberty I was stuck with 
it until I left.
At the time I wasn't affected but it would have be a severe restriction 
to me now and i could see that coming.

Just because an authoritarian restriction does not affect me now does 
not mean that I should not be concerned about societal trends and 
happenings that will affect us all in the future. Some of us, the 
founders of the Open Source movement have realised, need to be eternally 
vigilant.

Neil


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