If you break up with Amazon – or if a writer you love decides to take their books elsewhere – only Amazon can give you permission to move your books to a rival platform. That means that once you buy an ebook or audiobook that’s locked to Amazon with DRM, only Amazon can unlock it. And not just any felony! The penalty for violating DMCA 1201 is a five-year prison sentence and a $500,000 fine…for a first offense. Under Section 1201 of 1998’s Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), it is a felony to provide someone with a tool to remove DRM, even if no copyright infringement takes place. But while DRM doesn’t do much to prevent unauthorized use, it is a supremely powerful tool for preventing authorized use.

In practice, pirates find it trivial to remove DRM, or – easier still! – find a copy of the same file that someone else already removed the DRM from. DRM is a kind of encryption that is marketed to creators and publishers as a way of preventing unauthorized copying. Some moves were sneakier, like the use of Digital Rights Management (DRM) on ebooks and audiobooks. Today, a supermajority of US households get locked into a year’s Amazon shopping through Prime subscriptions. Some of those moves were overt, like selling us shipping a year at a time, in advance, through a program called Prime. It subsidized shipping and offered free returns.Īll the while, the company was scheming to lock buyers to its platform. First, it gave customers a good deal, with deep subsidies on common products from diapers to hardcovers.

Like all tech giants, Amazon’s growth strategy was to tap the capital markets to buy out potential rivals when they were just getting started, while selling products below cost to prevent new companies from springing up faster than Amazon could buy them out. Īudible is part of the Amazon conglomerate. The audiobook giant – a division of Amazon – controls more than 90 percent of the audiobook market in most commercially significant categories.Īudible built that monopoly the old-fashioned way: by cheating.

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