by DAN CALLOWAY
Published 23 December 2009 @ 17:56 UCT
LONDON, UK – An Israeli hacker claims to have broken the copyright protection inherent in Amazon’s Kindle e-Reader device, which has been sold to nearly one million customers world-wide.
The hack employed by the Israeli hacker known as Labba will allow any document stored on the Amazon Kindle or Kindle2 (in the proprietary .azw file format) to be transferred and read by any reader of the more familiar portable document file format of .pdf , which is available through Adobe Reader on just about any computer that supports it.
The hacker broke the copyright protection in response to a challenge he received from an Israeli hacking competition on the hacking website hacking.org.
This latest hacking success now calls into question whether publishers and authors of books currently sold through Amazon.com for its Amazon Kindle and Kindle2 should continue to make these books available to the extremely successful online company since anyone with Adobe Reader would be able to read the books for free.
Digital Rights Management (DRM), which is currently the protection mechanism for legally protecting or copyrighting another’s digital work has long been viewed by its users as a tool that is not as effective as it should be and limits consumers as to what they can do with the content that is protected by DRM.
This latest hack of copyrighted material for the Amazon Kindle and Kindle2 rides on the coat tails of a previously successful hacker, Jon Lech Johansen, known as DVD Jon, who in 1999 broke the copyright protection on DVDs and later went on to reverse engineer iTunes, forcing Apple to offer DRM-free music to its customers.
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