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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 21st, 2023

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  • Microsoft’s solution above is tacked-on and inelegant, it’s a bandaid to fix a problem with WMDRM that MTP devices were causing in the first place. MTP wasn’t built for enforcing DRM and and Amazon would just be setting themselves up to face the same issues if that was their goal here. Also, unlike Microsoft, they don’t have the advantage of being the original creators of MTP. If they did want a completely DRM controlled environment, turning the Kindle PC app into something more like iTunes where it’s the only program able to communicate with Kindles would have been a much better first step than implementing an industry standard file transfer protocol. They could have jumped straight to your second step like that.

    My best guess as to why they’re making the switch to MTP is because USB Mass Storage currently requires them to maintain a separate partition with a fixed size formatted in NTFS FAT32 on a Linux-based device just so it can occasionally be exposed to a PC it’s plugged into, and that’s… kinda stupid. MTP provides them the option to just not do all that. MTP is the standard mobile devices use these days, it’s going to be easier and cheaper for them to develop around and they won’t need two different file systems and partitions on one device anymore.


  • The Kindle doesn’t use Windows Media DRM for its DRM protected ebooks, they use Amazon’s own DRM. Even if they did use WMDRM though, this is just an extension for MTP that would enable it to be used for streaming WMDRM content. It “provides a mapping of WMDRM: Network Devices Protocol messages to the Media Transfer Protocol (MTP)” and that’s necessary because MTP would otherwise not provide the data necessary for for the DRM protected content to play.

    There’s still nothing here that would prevent you from copying your own “legitimately obtained” epub files or Amazon-encrypted AZW files to or from your PC.

    I see this article is the first result when searching “MTP DRM” on Google though 😉







  • I like to rag on Amazon as much as the next guy here, but this article seems a tad misleading. They do still show up when you plug them in. The article even says they use MTP now instead of functioning as a direct USB mass storage drive, which means you can still plug them into your PC and transfer files though File Explorer. Android handles USB file transfers the same way, and that works fine.