

A Leaked Contract Reveals that Amazon Insists on DRM - jamesbritt
http://www.the-digital-reader.com/2013/10/11/leaked-contract-reveals-amazon-insists-drm/#.Ulgjt3iP_qg

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Amadou
This contract echoes the story of Nina Palin's attempt to get her Free
(creative-commons share-alike) movie "Sita Sings the Blues" on netflix
streaming without DRM. Netflix refused. They even refused to let her put a
title-card at the start of the movie telling viewers that the movie was free
to download from other sources.

[http://blog.ninapaley.com/2010/04/23/turning-down-
netflix/](http://blog.ninapaley.com/2010/04/23/turning-down-netflix/)

Three years later she went full CC-0 (public domain) with the movie because
the hassle of dealing with other entities who simply couldn't understand the
share-alike license was too much.

[http://blog.ninapaley.com/2013/01/18/ahimsa-sita-sings-
the-b...](http://blog.ninapaley.com/2013/01/18/ahimsa-sita-sings-the-blues-
now-cc-0-public-domain/)

For anyone considering watching her movie - Roger Ebert rated it very highly.

[http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/sita-sings-the-
blues-2009](http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/sita-sings-the-blues-2009)

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RexRollman
DRM is a funny thing, in that the publishers seem to want it without realizing
that once a particular vendor finally gains a large marketshare, it actually
makes give them less power. The music industry finally realized this when
Apple got large in music sales. I wonder when the publishing industry will
wake up.

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devonbleak
"Insists" seems very misleading here. Defaults to? Sure. But insists on? No.
If they were insisting, there wouldn't be the "unless we mutually agree
otherwise" clause.

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wpietri
Yes. It could be that Amazon insists, but this sure doesn't prove it. To
demonstrate that I'd want to see a statement from a publisher.

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tzs
There is a new first paragraph on the article now:

\---------------------------------

Update: This post is now 10 hours old and in that time I have been told by at
least 20 different people on 5 different websites that I am wrong in how I
interpreted this contract. I think they are probably correct. If you are
finding this post for the first time then I suggest that you don’t read it.

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jcampbell1
This is just boilerplate. Boilerplate contracts get written to make doing
deals easier. It is more accurate that "Amazon defaults to" rather than
"Amazon Insists On".

I don't think there is a conspiracy here.

~~~
jfoster
I agree. Although I'd like to point out that it may not make sense from
Amazon's perspective for them to be DRM-agnostic. It would completely suit
their business interests for Kindle media to be a locked ecosystem. If Amazon
just sells ebooks that work with any device, their business is less
defensible.

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duaneb
It's also trivially broken, IIRC, it's a drm of convenience.

