Jake twittered about Amazon bricking some guy’s Kindle for some unrelated behavior (it’s not been a good week for Amazon and their fail). This is reported as a case of a “nasty thing about DRM,” but I don’t think it is.
My understanding is that DRM is locking content in such a way that it only works under the seller’s conditions, and often only on a certain device (I even looked it up on Wikipedia to be sure). Like iTunes purchased music on certain authorized Macs, for example, which thankfully is over (in truth, it sucked as a principle to me, but I never found it to be a real limitation). In order to use the content as the user wants, the DRM has to be removed or broken, which is a violation of the DMCA.
In this sense, Amazon’s e-books would count as media that are “DRM’ed,” since they can only be used on hardware with the Kindle software (the Kindle itself and at least the iPhone, don’t know about other platforms), and only by the purchaser. But the device isn’t, any more than a DVD player, which plays only DRM’ed content, is.
So this story isn’t a case of DRM gone amok, since what is being lost isn’t the device’s operation, or the content on the device, but its connection to Amazon. The content was apparently still viewable, just no new stuff could be added. Don’t get me wrong, this sucks, but it’s just like if Tivo decided to turn off your service, but all the content on your device would still work. You could argue that the Kindle’s connection to Amazon is part of its core functionality (and I’d agree), but it’s not a case of DRM. It’s a case of Amazon not respecting the agreement they have with their customer to provide service, not DRM. Not everything bad is DRM.
When you buy hardware locked to a service provider, this is the risk you take — you’re at the mercy of the content provider to continue to provide service. If you don’t like that arrangement, don’t buy the device. Hopefully enough people not buying it will tell the seller that open platforms are more valuable to consumers.
