Editorial by Cory Doctorow: “Audible is a monopolist. The audiobook giant – a division of Amazon – controls more than 90 percent of the audiobook market in most commercially significant categories. Audible built that monopoly the old-fashioned way: by cheating. Audible is part of the Amazon conglomerate. Like all tech giants, Amazon’s growth strategy was to tap the capital markets to buy out potential rivals when they were just getting started, while selling products below cost to prevent new companies from springing up faster than Amazon could buy them out.  On the way, Amazon played us all. First, it gave customers a good deal, with deep subsidies on common products from diapers to hardcovers. It subsidized shipping and offered free returns.  All the while, the company was scheming to lock buyers to its platform. Some of those moves were overt, like selling us shipping a year at a time, in advance, through a program called Prime.  Today, a supermajority of US households get locked into a year’s Amazon shopping through Prime subscriptions.  Some moves were sneakier, like the use of Digital Rights Management (DRM) on ebooks and audiobooks. DRM is a kind of encryption that is marketed to creators and publishers as a way of preventing unauthorized copying.  In practice, pirates find it trivial to remove DRM, or – easier still! – find a copy of the same file that someone else already removed the DRM from. But while DRM doesn’t do much to prevent unauthorized use, it is a supremely powerful tool for preventing authorized use.  Under Section 1201 of 1998’s Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), it is a felony to provide someone with a tool to remove DRM, even if no copyright infringement takes place. And not just any felony! The penalty for violating DMCA 1201 is a five-year prison sentence and a $500,000 fine…for a first offense. That means that once you buy an ebook or audiobook that’s locked to Amazon with DRM, only Amazon can unlock it. If you break up with Amazon – or if a writer you love decides to take their books elsewhere – only Amazon can give you permission to move your books to a rival platform…

The most incredible thing about DRM is that Amazon sold it to the publishers and rightsholders as a benefit, including it in a package of sweeteners and goodies that were designed to lock publishers into the platform – cheap advertising, generous recommendation policies, and high fees for writers who directly published on Amazon through Kindle Direct and the Audible Content Exchange (ACX).”