Amazon's Kindle and digital rights management

There have been sev­eral sto­ries over the last week about issues related to dig­i­tal rights man­age­ment (DRM) on Amazon’s Kindle. After much con­fu­sion from Amazon cus­tomer ser­vice, the final update, as far as I can tell, is as follows:

You are able to redown­load your books an unlim­ited num­ber of times to any spe­cific device.

Any one time the books can be on a finite num­ber of devices. In most cases that means you can have the same book on six dif­fer­ent devices.

Unfortunately the pub­lish­ers decide how many licenses, that is devices, a book can be on at any one time. While most of the time that will be five or six dif­fer­ent devices there will be times when it’s only one device.

At the present time there is no way to know how many devices can be licensed prior to buy­ing the book.

According to the cus­tomer rep, there is a project to try to get that infor­ma­tion avail­able to the cus­tomer but it’s not yet available.

Finally, when you have reached a limit of six devices and you swap one older device for a new one, it does not auto­mat­i­cally reset the num­ber of licenses so you can add the new one. Amazon can release all of the licenses which will remove any given book from all of the devices and then allow you to re-​​download it that same num­ber of times.

via KindleGate: Confusion Abounds Regarding Kindle Download Policy.

It sounds like Amazon’s try­ing to get the right bal­ance for you — but this points out a gen­eral prob­lem with DRM in the mar­ket­place: it’s very con­fus­ing. This under­cuts a gen­eral argu­ment out there that “the mar­ket­place has spo­ken” in terms of accep­tance of DRM. If con­sumers have lim­ited access to infor­ma­tion, the mar­ket is inef­fi­cient, and can­not accu­rately mea­sure con­sumer desires.

This kind of issue always makes me leery to pur­chase DRM pro­tected media, and when I do, it encour­ages me to see if there is a way to remove the pro­tec­tion (so that I can freely use what I’ve pur­chased, not so I can share it with the world) — even if I never do so, it’s nice to know I can if the com­pany fails or changes the rules on me.

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