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As some of you may already know, this week we received a DMCA take-down notice from Amazon requesting the removal of the tool kindlepid.py and instructions associated with it. Although we never hosted this tool (contrary to their claim), nor believe that this tool is used to remove technological measures (contrary to their claim), we decided, due to the vagueness of the DMCA law and our intention to remain in good relation with Amazon, to voluntarily follow their request and remove links and detailed instructions related to it.

"On February 10, 2012, the National Association of the Deaf (NAD) took the lead, and was joined by several other consumer groups, in submitting comments in support of a petition filed by Telecommunications for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing, Inc., Gallaudet University, and Participatory Culture Foundation requesting an exemption for certain classes of work from the anti-circumvention provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). Two of these exemption requests relate to closed captioning - one for IP based media and the other for fixed-disc based media. These exemptions will allow third parties to add or improve closed captioning on video programs without having to get permission from the copyright owner. ...." (with link to the text of the exemption)

The linked-to text of the exemption request is remarkavly clear and could bevery useful model in similar cases in other countries.

The author of the software in question, titled Kindlepid.py, is listed as Igor Skochinsky, a hardware hacker who performed a remarkable analysis of the Kindle and described in December 2007 how he was able to gain access to the device. It's unclear why Amazon waited so long to respond with a legal threat, and why the company targeted MobileRead.com: Skochinsky's original blog post about Kindlepid.py is dated December 2007, and the copy of the Kindlepid.py software hosted at the Googlepages.com Web-page posting site is still available for download at http://skochinsky.googlepages.com/azw-0.2.zip