Breaking DRM

One of the hassles of eBooks is commercial titles often come with DRM, or Digital Rights Management. This prevents you from moving a ebook from your nook to your Kindle, or from your Kindle to your kid's Kindle. Well, in the USA, the Supreme Court ruled that breaking DRM is not a crime, only what you do with the broken media once you have unlocked it. If you unlock a DRM's eBook so that you can transfer it to another device, and you bought the original, and own the the device you are transferring to, no law has been broken, and you are within your rights. If you then give a copy to your neighbor, then you have broken the law, but it was the act of giving it to your neighbor that was the offense, not the cracking of the DRM. This cannot be any more clear, and if anyone tells you otherwise, they are very wrong. Ok, that out of the way, the easiest tools to remove DRM from an ebook is a program called Calibre, plus a set of plugins that actually perform the cracking. A very cool individual who goes by the name of Apprentice Alf wrote a simple to understand article describing the process. You can read about that on his blog, Apprentice Alf's Blog.