When we talk about DRM restricting fair use, we are usually referring to the inability to copy and read the e-book on the platform of our choice. But there are other forms of fair use that are just as restricted.
On GalleyCat the other day, editor Jason Boog reported hitting a publisher-imposed “clipping limit” when he had highlighted 25 passages in a Kindle book. This limit meant that he couldn’t share and view all his marked passages online.
This kind of limit is troubling, especially for students who use highlighting as part of their study process—if they want to generate a list of highlighted passages to focus study on, they could run up against a limit that means they are unable to do so. (Of course, if they crack the DRM, they can copy and paste as many passages as they like—though that is illegal in many areas such as the United States.)
The more e-books replace printed books, the more onerous these restrictions will become. Sooner or later, publishers will have to come to terms with the idea that some legal uses of e-books involve copying and pasting content from them.
It used to be that you could remove the clipping limit on Kindle ebooks without actually removing the DRM. But that changed around Jan/Feb 2011, and now the clipping limit and the text-to-speech flag are also use in decoding the DRM, so if you change them you can no longer read the book.
Well, unless you remove the DRM altogether, of course…
The unfortunate truth is that “fair use” is a fuzzy and undefined concept that has never been codified in copyright law. Content owners have purchased dozens of laws from complient legislatures.
But nobody is interested in laws that are simply for the public good. Somebody has to profit so somebody can afford to pay. Hence “fair use” is just an delusion at this point.
Same thing happened to me with “Live From New York,” a nonfiction book about the TV show Saturday Night Live. In my example, it was even worse. At some point in the past Hachette allowed highlights and clipping, but when I “bought” the ebook from the Kindle store, they’d turned off ALL ability to make highlights. I didn’t even get an error message–I went along happily highlighting funny sentences or paragraphs I wanted to refer to later, and then after about five days I went online to check out the synced highlights and saw a message that I’d gone over my limit–which it turns out is apparently zero.
Amazon gave me a refund on the book, after first investigating and confirming that it wasn’t simply a glitch. If Amazon hadn’t, I quite likely would have stripped the DRM and posted it on a file sharing site out of pure anger. I know “fair use” is far from cut and dried (although it’s not as vague as companies would like you to believe), but to disable ALL fair use seems a clear bad-faith violation of the purpose of copyright.
I’ve never heard of zero as an intentional limit. 10% at the very least.
Did you ever press Menu and choose “View notes and marks’ ?
No matter what limit is ever involved, the highlighted portions should still show in the ebook — they are actually kept in an auxiliary file that is binary, and any limits apply to how much can be autocopied by the Kindle to the “My Clippings” file AND how much can be shown on the kindle.amazon.com web-annotations page.
A MyClippings-file limit of zero should be reported. However, any limit for the My Clippings file will result in a dialog-box message shown you AT THE TIME you are highlighting the passage and ending the highlight. Yet you mention being able to blithely go ahead, reading and highlighting other sections.
If any limit was intentional for just the web-annotations page, that -would- have been some kind of glitch and people can return an ebook for problems like that.
What was the name of the book? I’d like to try it to explore the limits problem.
@Andrys: It is my understanding that 10% is the default, so I too was surprised. And yes, *of course* I checked the MyClippings file directly from the Kindle, from my PC desktop, and on kindle.amazon.com. This isn’t a stupid user error in the traditional sense. (Meaning: I have the screensaver hack installed, but it’s *never* created problems for other DRM’d Kindle books so it’s quite low on my suspects list.)
What alerted me to the problem to begin with was my highlights — which remained visible within the text on my Kindle, as you are aware — weren’t syncing across devices. That’s when I checked the MyClippings doc and discovered that every highlight was replaced with a clipping limit warning. When I visited kindle.amazon.com, I found that while previous customers had been able to make highlights, I had exceeded my clipping limit on the very first highlight, mysteriously.
I sat on the phone with an Amazon CSR for a half hour, most of which was spent with me gently trying to interrupt him to get him to stop reading the damned boilerplate to me about publisher-set clipping limits. [*sigh*] Finally he re-sent the file to me and we tried again — still zero. He had no other explanation or help, and I couldn’t seem to convince him that this was either an anomaly that should be investigated further, or a publisher position completely antithetical to Amazon’s Kindle brand. So I gave up and got a refund.
Title is in first post if you have Amazon contacts and can escalate. Please do let me know if you discover something.
The MyClippings file warnings SHOULD have appeared to you as dialog boxes, interrupting your work. They’re usually pretty disconcerting to people.
I’ve gone way past 10% in two of my favorite and quite popular non-fiction books, w/o problems. Maybe they’re easier on those.
But what you have with this book is an anomaly. I do want to try the book. Could you give me the title or send it to andrys1 [at] yahoo.com ? Thanks.
That is a problem book or the software is buggy, when others could highlight and you couldn’t.
It’s as if they are, against their own intentions, counting others’ highlights in with your allowance… I’m very interested in this whole area.
Thanks!
“Sooner or later, publishers will have to come to terms with the idea that some legal uses of e-books involve copying and pasting content from them”
Not if all you do is wax philosophical about it. They don’t have to do shit if you don’t fight back