Amazon is closing a Kindle loophole that makes it easy to remove DRM

The Kindle brand and its devices have been around since 2007, eighteen years, as a matter of fact, and way back when, things like Wi-Fi and Bluetooth weren’t as ubiquitous as they are now, which means we used to rely on cables to transfer documents. This is why Amazon offers a function known as “Download & Transfer via USB,” which it will soon remove.

As you can imagine, the ancient feature doesn’t get much use nowadays, that is, unless you like to break DRM, which is precisely what some in the e-book community use the feature for, downloading their e-books with an older version of DRM that is easy to crack. Thus, Amazon is warning it will shut down its Download & Transfer via USB feature starting February 26th.

Amazon will soon close a loophole that made it easy to remove DRM from its e-books

Is this the start of a DRM-breaking crackdown?

Amazon has used a few different kinds of e-book formats over the years, from AZW to KFX. As you can imagine, each format works differently and displays differently. This is how Amazon offers some of the best-formatted e-books on the market (blowing ePub out of the water), but all these different formats can also offer various forms of DRM. The newer formats are harder to crack or can’t be cracked, which is why many users resorted to using the Download & Transfer via USB function to grab AZW3 files that are easy to remove the DRM from using existing (but old) cracking methods.

You see, the type of file your device downloads from Amazon can be dependent on that device (or even feature), and the Download & Transfer via USB feature reliably transfers older file types, one that is easy to crack. This is also the reason many use older Kindles to download their e-books, gaining access to older file types.

The thing to remember here is that it is illegal to remove DRM, even for personal use, but that doesn’t stop everyone, creating a problem when people do share their cracked files across the web, otherwise known as pirates, and frankly, it’s kind of surprising Amazon has left this Download & Transfer via USB feature open for so long. So soon enough, one of the easiest avenues for removing DRM from Kindle e-books will be gone, begging the question of whether this is just the start of a larger crackdown.

At the very least, you’ll still be able to transfer your e-books over Wi-Fi, and of course, transferring your e-books through Calibre will still work, too, so it’s not like we are losing access to dragging and dropping files onto a Kindle, we are simply losing access to a tool that facilitated easy piracy by pushing older formats of retail books from the website to your Kindle over USB.

And so the war between pirates and DRM rages on; as this is not the first time Amazon has cracked down on its user’s ability to remove DRM, there’s a reason many enthusiasts moved to an older version of the Kindle PC app to grab the type of files necessary for easy DRM removal, the newer versions stopped cooperating.

Still, just as the music industry learned that the war against piracy is one it can never win, Amazon will too learn that the war on piracy is unwinnable. After all, if we pay for a file, we should be able to use it anywhere we want, and putting limits on such things only ensures someone will find a way around it. The phrase “if buying isn’t owning, then piracy isn’t stealing” hasn’t grown in popularity in a vacuum; maybe it’s time Amazon recognizes this and drags the book publishers into the 21st century already.