Sometimes it is not necessity That is the mother of Invention, but the law. Peter Purgathofer, an associate professor at Vienna University of Technology has created an ingenious and completely legal method for stripping the DRM from a Kindle ebook. It involves a Lego robot, a computer, and a Kindle.
The robotic portion is a Lego Mindstorms bot That is programmed to Repeatedly depress the next page button on the Kindle, then tap the spacebar on the computer. Hitting the spacebar triggers the webcam on the computer, Causing it to take a still image. The Kindle is facing the camera so each frame captures the text as an image. The files are Automatically dropped into a folder and processed through a character recognition program.
So what do you get from this Rube Goldberg contraption? A DRM-free ebook. There are various software tools to remove the DRM from an ebook, but doing so is Technically illegal. Even if you bought the book, it is against the law in most places to break any DRM That is attached to a product. So, the act of taking photos of a screen and Translating them back into text isn’ta illegal, but running the file through softwarethat does the same thing is against the law.
Purgathofer did not make this device as a serious attempt to get around DRM – it’s a statement against the bizarre laws surrounding ebook DRM and the loss of ownership consumers experience. He says he only Digitized one book in this way as a proof of concept, but is careful to point out it was only done for staff use and was not shared.
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