Signatures presented to Amazon

Defective by Design has presented its petition to Jeff Bezos and Amazon, demanding that Amazon remove Digital Restrictions Management (DRM) from all their products.

Since the petition launched, Amazon has taken two small steps away from total DRM-enforced control. First, their publishing platform changed to make it easier for publishers to submit DRM-free PDFs. Second, a proprietary firmware update allowed Amazon's "Swindles" to read DRM-free PDFs that were not downloaded from Amazon.

These changes should help publishers who want to do the right thing. And the changes make it easier to push other individual publishers to sell their books DRM-free through Amazon.

These changes don't, however, fix a key problem with the Kindle -- its software is still proprietary, so Amazon still has full remote control over the materials on readers' devices.

We're submitting the petition to Amazon to remind them that the thousands of writers, readers, academics, librarians, and public intellectuals who signed our petition asked for much more: a full removal of any DRM from the ebooks Amazon sells and the "Swindle" device itself.

Until Amazon removes all DRM, Amazon is putting our basic freedoms at risk in order to lock publishers and readers into their platform, bringing us closer to the dystopia envisioned in 1984 or The Right to Read.