DRM

Cross-posted from "Stop Killing Games has exceeded 1.3 million signatures!" by @the16bitgamer@programming.dev in !games@sh.itjust.works

Link for those who've yet to see it/sign the petition: https://www.stopkillinggames.com/

Cross-posted from "Capcom celebrates the first anniversary of Kunitsu-Gami: Path of the Goddess by ripping out its Denuvo DRM" by @free@rss.ponder.cat in !pcgamer@rss.ponder.cat

Birthdays can be tricky. They can be a celebration of our continued existence, or a grim reminder of our steady forward march towards an inevitable mortality—or, in the case of Kunitsu-Gami: Path of the Goddess, a birthday can mark the occasion that Capcom removes the Denuvo DRM software that's been a headache for its customers throughout the last decade, according to its SteamDB update history (via DSOGaming).

Mercifully, Kunitsu-Gami's Denuvo implementation doesn't seem to have been the source of many player complaints since its launch last July. Other Capcom games in recent years haven't been so lucky. In 2020, Capcom pulled Denuvo from DMC5, where casual testing found it had been decreasing performance by as much as 25%.

(Image credit: Capcom)

In 2021, Digital Foundry tested to confirm that Denuvo was responsible for similar performance issues in Resident Evil Village, though it wasn't removed from the game until 2023. It's worth noting that Monster Hunter Wilds, which continues to attract negative Steam reviews over ongoing performance issues, is strapped down with both Denuvo and Capcom's internally developed rights management software.

Denuvo seems to linger longer in games from Capcom's most well-known franchises like Monster Hunter and Resident Evil, presumably to protect sales numbers from piracy while demand remains high. Its removal from Kunitsu-Gami a year after launch might be an indicator that its widely positive critical reception—we gave it a very favorable 86 in our own Kunitsu-Gami review—didn't translate into strong sales interest.

Kunitsu-Gami has been noticeably absent from Capcom's quarterly and yearly financial reports since its launch. Capcom's handling of the game seems to have generated some criticism from its investors: In a shareholder meeting earlier this month, the company was asked why Exoprimal received promotional support after a middling demo response, while Kunitsu-Gami "received positive feedback from its demo" but "did not appear to receive strong promotional support to drive sales."

(Image credit: Capcom)

"For Kunitsu-Gami: Path of the Goddess, we have been maximizing promotions for it as a new IP. In the fiscal year ending March 2026, we released this title for Nintendo Switch 2 along with additional downloadable content," Capcom said. "We remain committed to increasing awareness and communicating the appeal of both titles."

As for what that commitment might look like, Capcom is also celebrating Kunitsu-Gami's launch anniversary with a new in-game talisman that will change the game's background music "to an 8-bit retro style in certain situations."

Kunitsu-Gami: Path of the Goddess is available now on Steam.

From PCGamer latest via this RSS feed

Cross-posted from "Nintendo Wii The Size Of A Game Boy Cartridge Finally Released Open Source" by @misk@sopuli.xyz in !retrogaming@lemmy.world

Cross-posted from "Signal shuts the blinds on Microsoft Recall with the power of DRM" by @free@rss.ponder.cat in !theregister@rss.ponder.cat

From The Register via this RSS feed

cross-posted from: https://programming.dev/post/30095259

I made a curator with (almost) every DRM-free game on Steam

cross-posted from: https://feddit.org/post/12528811

cross-posted from: https://rss.ponder.cat/post/168917

For streaming services such as Netflix, Digital Rights Management (DRM) systems provide a level of control over the company’s most valuable assets, including movies, TV shows, and other content for consumer consumption.

DRM not only restricts access to customers authorized to consume content, it can determine when and how it’s consumed too. When all goes to plan, DRM should also prevent end users from casually copying movies and TV shows, which should result in a positive contribution towards minimizing the spread of pirated content online; at least in theory.

Widevine Everywhere

Ultimately, whether users loathe it or just hate it, DRM exists in billions of web browsers and devices. One of the most widespread is Google’s Widevine and avoiding its footprint today is almost futile. It can be found in Chrome, Firefox and similar browsers, mobile platforms such as Android, videogame consoles, plus many set-top boxes and smart TVs. At least five billion of them, most probably more.

Unsurprisingly, Widevine has been exploited and reverse engineered over the years, as evidenced by the content it’s supposed to protect ending up on pirate sites, almost without exception. In 2020, Google took action against Chrome extension Widevine L3 Decryptor, which was capable of decrypting Widevine content keys by hijacking calls to the browser’s Encrypted Media Extensions (EME).

Problems persisted throughout 2021 and 2022 with Widevine Dump but the problems haven’t gone away. The same goes for individuals and groups committed to countering Widevine, although it’s still possible to attract negative attention.

OnlyFans Targets CDRM-Project

In a DMCA takedown notice dated April 22, 2025, OnlyFans owner Fenix International Limited informs GitHub that it had “recently become aware” of repos on the platform with code “specifically designed” to circumvent Fenix’s DRM, aka Widevine.

“The identified repositories contain step-by-step instructions which are specifically designed to circumvent the DRM protections in place on OnlyFans. The repositories contain links that are ‘hard-coded’ and specifically targeted at OnlyFans,” Fenix writes.

“The coding is designed to impersonate a video player in order to decrypt and play DRM protected files, obtaining the ‘secret’ token required to play the DRM protected content. The downloaded files are then converted into an MP4 format which has the DRM protection removed.”

CDRM-Project repo before suspension

In line with its pro-developer policy when processing DMCA takedown notices, GitHub contacted the operator of the main repo and the operators of six additional forks, with an opportunity to address the complaint and avoid suspension.

For reasons that aren’t revealed, GitHub’s outreach couldn’t prevent the suspension of the entire CDRM-Project repo and all reported forks.

CDRM-Project repo is no more

GitHub requested Fenix to identify “every specific file” in the repo that it considers infringing; Fenix responded with a statement that the “entire repository is infringing” and should be removed.

Anti-Circumvention Complaint

To GitHub’s credit, when rightsholders allege violations of the DMCA’s anti-circumvention provisions, GitHub conducts its own assessment. If there is no basis for a claim, GitHub sometimes finds other copyright-related grounds, but here there is no pushback. That’s usually a sign of a complaint that stands up under intense scrutiny.

Another unusual aspect to the complaint is the Fenix response to GitHub’s request to provide the alleged infringer’s contact details, if they’re in possession of them. In most cases rightsholders say they’re unaware of those details but here, Fenix provides the details of two sets of owners and two sets of contributors.

The project is now being made available via a repo on cdm-project.com but how long that’s likely to last is unclear.

When any DRM system unnecessarily restricts access to content by design or due to inherent limitations, those who suffer the most are legitimate customers. Most have no interest in piracy, were never part of the original problem, but are responsible for the bulk of the revenue. Once DRM starts to feel like DRM, that’s where the big problems start.

From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.

From TorrentFreak via this RSS feed

cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/35074590

Cross-posted from "iPod fans evade Apple’s DRM to preserve 54 lost clickwheel-era games" by @simple@lemm.ee in !games@lemmy.world

From their about-page:

We make games last forever

A home for building and playing your curated game collection, GOG is a digital distribution platform that puts gamers first and respects their need to own games.

GOG.com is Part of Polish CD PROJEKT group.

Cross-posted from "GOG.com from Poland - DRM-free computer games" by @Blaze@lemmy.dbzer0.com in !buyeuropean@feddit.uk

Cross-posted from "Liberate your Kindle books before leaving Amazon (Tutorial)" by @snuggledick@lemm.ee in !buyeuropean@feddit.uk

Hey there, I wanted to get away from Amazon Kindle but of course take all my ebooks with me, I paid for them after all. Unfortunately Amazon tries really hard to stop you from doing this by introducing new file formats, DRM and encryption, disabling functionality on their website and so on, making this endeavor quite a hassle, but I finally managed to liberate my books so I can use them with other ebook readers. There's a bunch of different tutorials for this out there, but I found each of them lacks one or two crucial points that prevent it from working, so I thought I'd write up a short tutorial with all the bits of information collected from all over the web and save you some frustration and time (took me a couple of hours to make this work).

I'm not sure if this is the best community to post this to, if you know a better one please let me know or feel free to cross-post it there.

So here's how to get all your ebooks out of Amazon, strip them of DRM/copy protection and convert them to EPUB for use with other ebook readers:

1. Install Calibre (available for Linux, Windows and Mac) using whatever method works best for your operating system. I'm using Arch Linux and running "sudo pacman -S calibre" did the trick.

2. Download the latest release CANDIDATE! of the DeDRM plugin, NOT! the latest release! All tutorials I found referred to the stable release v10.0.3, which does NOT work with Amazon's latest DRM shit. At the time of writing this "RC1 v10.0.9" was the latest available version. You'll find it here: https://github.com/noDRM/DeDRM_tools/releases/tag/v10.0.9

3. Download the plugin "KFX Input.zip" at the bottom of this forum post: https://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=291290

4. Unzip the DeDRM release you downloaded, inside you'll find a file "DeDRM_plugin.zip" which is the actual plugin. The KFX Input plugin does NOT need to be unzipped.

5. Start Calibre, go to "Preferences / Advanced / Plugins" and with the button "Load plugin from file" install the two plugins you downloaded. For the DeDRM plugin make sure you select the unzipped file "DeDRM_plugin.zip", not the downloaded release package.

6. Restart Calibre.

7. Go to your "My Devices" page on Amazon (I can't provide a direct link here because it's different for every country, but you should be able to find it). Select your Kindle device and copy its serial number. Alternatively you can look it up on your Kindle itself in the device information in the settings, however you obivously can't copy/paste it from there and I found it hard tell letter O and digit 0 apart, so the first method is probably less error prone.

8. Back in Calibre open the plugins section in the preferences again, search for the DeDRM plugin and double-click it. In the new dialog click "Kindle eInk ebooks", then the green plus icon and paste your Kindle's serial number. The fact that you need the serial number was also missing in most tutorials, took me ages to figure that out.

9. Optional step: Go to your "My Content" page on Amazon where all your purchased ebooks are listed. Select all and click "deliver to device" or whatever it's called in your localized Amazon, and select your Kindle. Hit sync on your Kindle device. This is to make sure that all your purchased ebooks are actually saved on the device as we're gonna copy the files from there in the next step. You can skip this if all your books are already downloaded to your Kindle or if you only want those that are.

10. Connect your Kindle to your computer via USB. Calibre should automatically detect it. Make sure your Kindle is in "USB Drive Mode", not "Charging Mode", so Calibre can access the files on it. For me this was the default when plugging the USB cable in.

11. In the top menu in Calibre click on "Device", this should give you a list of all books on your Kindle.

12. Select all or some books you want to liberate, right click and click "Add books to library" in the context menu. Your books should now be all be copied to your library on your computer, but they're still in Amazon's proprietary AZW or KFX format

13. To make them usable with other ebook readers switch back to your local library ("Libary" button in the top menu) where you should now find all the books you just copied. Again select all books in the list and click "Convert" in the top menu. In the new dialog tweak the options as you wish or just hit "OK" to start. Depending on how many books you got this may take a little while.

14. Done! You now got a bunch of DRM-free EPUB files in your library that you can use with whatever ebook reader you want.

Few notes:

• If you get errors like "books can't be converted because of DRM" in step 13, make sure that the correct version of the DeDRM plugin is properly installed and you configured the correct serial number and start over from step 11.

• A bunch of sites tell you that you can download AZW directly from your "My Content" page on Amazon, but they removed that function in February 2025.

• If you've tried this before you probably stumbled upon a tool called "epubor" quite often which is trash and tries to make you pay for liberating the ebooks you already own, it doesn't offer anything that Calibre doesn't do for free.

This isn't a debate about the legality of the matter, but on whether it's ethical to DeDRM ebooks that you've checked out from a library. The publishing company and author are usually paid for each copy that you've lent, which is often why eBooks exhaust large parts of a library's budget. If you are able to loan a book for a month, but you DeDRM it and don't share it anyone else, and therefore instead finish it in two months, is this ethical? Or have you intentionally reduced the potential for more revenue to the author by instead not lending it twice? Do the publishers predatory licensing fees for libraries make this more ethical?

Cross-posted from "Valve's DRM was inspired by an exec's nephew, who 'used a $500 check I'd sent him for school expenses and bought himself a CD-ROM replicator… he sent me a lovely thank you note'" by @nomugisan@lemmy.dbzer0.com in !piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com

cross-posted from: https://sopuli.xyz/post/24356878

Cross-posted from "YouTube DRM added on ALL videos with TV (TVHTML5) clients" by @rssbot@lemmy.bestiver.se in !hackernews@lemmy.bestiver.se

Comments on Ycombinator

Cross-posted from "Guide to Removing DRM From Amazon Kindle E-Books" by @NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zip in !piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com

This is a grey area for piracy since you need to own the ebook but... you also don't really "own" anything purchased in digital distribution and this is removing DRM from that. Suffice to say, if this were Nintendo they would try to sue you so it is probably more piracy than not.

Confirmed working as of a few minutes ago since I wanted to rebuild this with KVM.

Based on https://www.reddit.com/r/Calibre/comments/1c2ryfz/ and comments thereof.

1. Create a new virtual machine. I recently used KVM directly but also had success with Virtual Box.
2. Install Windows 10
3. Disable internet access for the VM.
4. Download and install Kindle 2.4.70904 (SHA256 2e2e4e5bb9fd585947244a4a62ce5baca47818c439d0213cc9a5a96f9a692119) from https://kindleforpc.s3.amazonaws.com/70904/KindleForPC-installer-2.4.70904.exe
5. Run the Kindle app and disable updating (Tools > Options > General > disable "Automatically install updates..."). Optionally change the save path.
6. Run the batch script disable_k4pc_download.bat (SHA256 656fbabfa9d1bb3fd1160100391fbf3886597633178e37cffcffe747d3b66567
   ) under step 2a at https://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=361503 to ACTUALLY disable automatic upgrading
7. Re-enable networking.
8. Download and install Calibre. 7.13.0 from https://download.calibre-ebook.com/7.13.0/. This version is known working and all efforts I found used Windows so I went with the msi (SHA256 7c1b57b6f55076cc646a30eb6394ec00df18be373c3badf80d7ee39152ccffda
   ) since this install exists solely to strip DRM before I then add them to my Calibre-Web server.
9. Launch Calibre and install the KFX Input plugin from the built in plugin manager
10. Separately download the 10.0.9 version of the DeDRM plugin (newer may work but, again, lazy) from https://github.com/noDRM/DeDRM_tools/releases/download/v10.0.9/DeDRM_tools_10.0.9.zip. SHA256 of d46e7ff94a46dc871eb9b7e639e6da1883823cd5a9d705d53f51bd9c251aabda
11. Launch Kindle, login, and download whatever you want to strip DRM from. I did run into some weirdness where I had an exclamation point after logging in but restarting the k4pc app allowed me to download books.
12. In Calibre, add all the books you downloaded by clicking and dragging the .azw file from Explorer to the Calibre window. You must do this from the downloaded directory as DeDRM is dependent on metadata in the same directory. This can be automated using a batch script pretty trivially.
13. Then convert them to a non azw3 format (mobi if you are putting it back on a Kindle. epub otherwise).
14. And then all the epub files in your Calibre library should have had DRM removed and be ready to import into your real Calibre library (or in a random folder on your computer)

If rolled out widely, this would make web browsers and third-party YouTube clients without a DRM license unusable for YouTube playback, download, etc. This would include almost all open-source web browsers and almost all third-party YouTube clients. Archive link to reddit post about this

Archive link

Bookshop.org is apparently tackling Amazon in order to bring more profit to authors. Sounds great, right? Well, the issue is that the ebooks they sell are only available to be read in their app. They're not even available for downloading as LCP-protected ePubs able to be read in another LCP-supported reader. He really tries to avoid the questions asked by the journalist on the topic of DRM. Ironic how he then talks about allowing customers to own the eBook, while at the same time only allowing them to lease a license through his own store. See the following quotes:

What’s interesting about the music industry is that it got digitized first through Napster, which had no business model, and everyone was stealing everything. Then the iPod, and there was a fight over [digital rights management]. And Steve Jobs famously won the DRM fight with the iPod. And they said, “Just publish MP3s, DRM is never going to work,” and the music labels capitulated.

Then we moved to Spotify and we brought DRM back. Now, everybody has a streaming service that streams DRM music. So it goes. With video, broadly, DRM just won from the beginning. Everything was always DRM from the start. Books could go either way. A book is a PDF. I get a lot of galleys from authors who come on Decoder, and I just get PDFs with watermarks. And I’m like, “Why don’t books just work like this?”

But the publishers obviously want DRM. The Kindle file format is DRM to hell and back, and no one else can even read it. There are other formats, but you’re at the most Decoder question of all: you’re in a format war with a very late ‘90s DRM problem embedded in the heart of it. How do you think about that problem? Is it that we need a new format? Is it that the publishers need to give up on DRM because the people want to pay regardless of the existence of piracy? What is the shape of that conversation in 2025?

I have a slightly more nuanced view. I think that if you go out into the internet, about 80 percent of readers don’t notice or care. And 20 percent of them are adamantly and virulently against DRM. And then publishers, of course, are terrified of the Napster days happening to their industry. They don’t want it to all be piracy because the recording industry saw 80 percent of their revenue disappear when music went digital, and they’ve brought it back now with Spotify and streaming, and so now they’ve recovered. But it was a big blow. Publishers obviously don’t want that to happen.

I think that if there’s a system that allows people to own their books, ebooks, so they’re not leasing them but they actually own them. They don’t have to worry about a device taking them away from them or retailers taking their books away or making changes to their books after they’ve purchased them, which we’ve seen with ebooks. So they should own them, they should have control of the content and they should be portable. They should be able to put them on whatever device they want. I think that there should be a way to do that and still keep authors paid. Because completely removing every restriction and just being like, “Okay, we’re going to release the new Harry Potter book as a PDF and hope that people pay for it.” I think that they would suffer a massive loss of revenue.

And I particularly am concerned about authors even more than I care about publishing companies. Authors should get paid for their work. Artists should get paid for their work. Period. And so there should be a system for artists to be paid for the work of writing books and that needs to be preserved. But DRM was implemented based on Amazon’s designs and publishers working with Amazon to prevent piracy. And that happened in 2005, 2006, 2007. It’s been a long time. There’s new technologies out there. We can find a way to create portable, flexible ebooks that are owned that still make sure that the publishers and authors get paid.

That’s, I guess, my Holy Grail, and that’s not going to happen right away. But in five or 10 years, I would love to have the kind of clout that Steve Jobs had in saying, “This has to end or this has to change.” The thing is, before you get that kind of clout you actually have to have some customers. You have to have some readers so that the market will listen to you.

So what kind of files are you selling today?

They are almost all DRM protected using LCP DRM, which is a new standard, which is a great standard. But that’s because major publishers require it. And then we have a small selection of DRM-free ebooks that people will be able to buy and download and use on whatever device they want. And we’re going to be growing that DRM-free selection so that we end up with hopefully a catalog that is diverse and has maybe half DRM-free and half publisher-supported DRM.

Cross-posted from "Calibre subreddit succumbs to (probable) pressure and removes a thread discussing a fully legal way of bypassing an e-book DRM solution (LCP) created by a particularly litigious organization" by @Yingwu@lemmy.dbzer0.com in !reddit@lemmy.world

Sorry for the long title. Some context to this: Readium LCP is a DRM-solution created and delivered by the non-profit foundation EDRLab (I guess we've learned by now that non-profit doesn't equal good), based in France.

EDRLab is an international, non-profit development laboratory working on the deployment of an open, interoperable and accessible digital publishing ecosystem worldwide.

In recent years they've gained a large market share in the EU first and foremost, providing both regular e-book shops in many EU countries and libraries with this DRM (if you're interested in some more technical information regarding this DRM solution, I'd recommend reading Terence's previous blog post). What's particular to this solution is that they've historically been very litigious about any attempts to DeDRM it. The most famous plugin for DeDRMing books in Calibre (mainly Adobe DRM) has been the NoDRM plugin, and they did release a DeDRM solution to LCP v1.0 but they were threatened with legal action with a DMCA takedown request (read more on Github).

In recent days, Terence Eden posted a fully legal solution on his blog on how to bypass their DRM. This was also posted to the /r/Calibre subreddit, see the following image: I also made a thread on Lemmy here.

Nonetheless, after around a day the thread was removed on the Calibre subreddit. The only rule I could find that maybe could be applied to this (if it was illegal, and if Terence did this with any other material that wasn't his own) is the rule against piracy. But it feels weird.

This subreddit has previously allowed, and still allow, discussions around the NoDRM plugin and how to DeDRM the Adobe DRM. What makes this fully legal solution of bypassing LCP any different? It can probably be deduced that the EDRLab foundation contacted the subreddits moderators, or reddit admins, and "threatened" them in order to have it taken down. Or guilt tripped them as they also did towards Terence. Aside from their previous DMCA takedown request to the NoDRM people, just look at their arrogant correspondence towards Terence (more in his blog post). Threatening him on no legal basis as well as somehow blaming their failure on developing accessibility tools to him posting about this solution:

"We were planning to now focus on new accessibility features on our open-source Thorium Reader, better access to annotations for blind users and an advanced reading mode for dyslexic people. Too bad; disturbances around LCP will force us to focus on a new round of security measures, ensuring the technology stays useful for ebook lending (stop reading after some time) and as a protection against oversharing."

These are some of the reasons why I think a federated web will be necessary moving forth. I really dislike DRM, but also these methods that DRM organizations use in order to control the conversation. Thanks for reading and engaging with my small fixation on DRM and especially LCP :)