DIY kindle scanner from peter purgathofer on Vimeo.
Peter Purgathofer, an associate professor at Vienna University of Technology has created a proof of concept lego robot that continously presses next on the Kindle of which a laptop takes an screenshot of the page and saved safely onto his computer which is uploaded to a optical character recognition software online automatically. Unlike softwares that remove DRM from the ebooks which are considered illegal, this method is not illegal.
He says:
“It’s not intended as a statement against e-books, which he loves, he says, but rather what he considers a “dramatic loss of rights for the book owner. “The owner isn’t even an owner anymore but rather a licensee of the book.”
DIY kindle scanner. This is an art project reflecting the relation of book scanning, copyright, and digital rights management. This is not intended to be understood as an instruction or invitation, but rather as a provocative thought experiment.
In 2002, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos wrote in an open letter to the authors guild: »When someone buys a book, they are also buying the right to resell that book, to loan it out, or to even give it away if they want. Everyone understands this.« [oreillynet.com/pub/wlg/1291]
A few years later, his company built a device that effectively violates the very ideas he expressed in this statement.
The DIY kindle scanner is an art installation reflecting this loss of rights Jeff Bezos first defended for us, but then chose to remove. It also is a statement about the futility of DRM.
