Say what you will, but the idea of a portable MP3 player didn’t really catch on until the pirates got a hold of it. It was only after they figured out how to rip CDs and operate file-sharing networks on the Internet that everyone wanted to do the MP3 thing. It seems that e-books could be taking a similar turn.

As you may already know, any purchased content for the Amazon Kindle comes attached with digital rights management not unlike what comes attached with msot of the content purchased through iTunes and similar services. Well, the “right” community has figured out how to remove that copy protection.

More specifically, there is an Israeli user called ‘i♥cabbages’ who has managed to remove Amazon’s encryption from its titles. A Spanish user has managed to remove the regional restrictions too. The net result, if you were to do as they did, is that you can have “free” access to anything in Amazon’s Kindle catalog.

Just as with music piracy and the like, you’ll easily fall into all sorts of legal gray areas with these kinds of practices. However, whether you yourself do them or not, it seems that the pirates have got a hold of the Kindle’s DRM and this could bode well for Kindle sales, but not for Kindle content sales.

Source: NewLaunches