Nicholas from the Participatory Culture Foundation: Although Amazon tries to push their users towards DRMed media, the new Kindle Fire can in fact play your DRM free videos, if you can get them on there. Amazon doesnt make it easy to convert and sync videos and music to your device without going through their servers, but a new version of Miro, released today, does just that. First, Download Miro . Second, plug in your Kindle Fire with a USB cable and it will appear in the Connect tab in Miro. Third, drag any videos or music to the Kindle and they will convert and sync. That’s it! Note that videos that arent purchased from Amazon will appear in the Gallery app on your Kindle, not in the Video tab. Miro is free and open-source software, so if you’d like to help it reach more devices and add more syncing features, you can Join the project here . ( Disclosure: I am proud to volunteer on the board of the Participatory Culture Foundation )

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Load DRM-free media on the Kindle Fire with Miro

Gremlin sez, “Sonos recently pushed an update to their once stellar music system which disabled windows DRM. They decided that it was unnecessary to continue to support this feature moving forward. Unfortunately they also pushed this update without warning to many customers, and they are offering no way for those customers to roll back to the previous version. Their answer to those customers effected is that they’ve made the decision for us. Many customers have been complaining, but it sets a dangerous precedent for them to be able to remove features at will. Today it’s a lightly used DRM system (mostly it effects people using Zune Pass at this point) tomorrow maybe it’ll be Sirius Satellite, spotify, or something else more people use. We’ve suggested that we’d be fine with them allowing us to roll back and making the decision ourselves to not take future update but they will not allow this to occur.” It’s entirely possible that the decision wasn’t Sonos’s to make. After all, DRM license agreements routinely provide for “revocation” in which a DRM vendor or licensing body reserves the right to order its partners to discontinue the playback of its DRM for some reason or another. Which is one of the great dangers of DRM: you buy a device with six features today, and tomorrow it has five, or four, or three, or none. The negotiations resulting in these confiscations are confidential, conducted between giant corporations without any input from the people who’ve bought the equipment and the media to play on it. I wrote a long, open letter to Wired editor Chris Anderson about this in 1994, when he told me that rejecting DRM was “idealistic” and defended taking a “pragmatic stance” when reviewing technology that had DRM in it. But worrying about what happens when your devices are designed to be remotely deactivated without your consent or knowledge is eminently pragmatic and has nothing to do with idealism, as we keep on learning. Question 3.6 “Sonos will no longer support the Windows Media DRM format”

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Sonos removes Windows DRM playback, customers left high & dry

Espen sez, “Yesterday, the Norwegian book industry introduced a scheme where they would sell electronic books on little plastic cards, to be inserted in proprietary readers - an astonishingly stupid idea even by their standards. Here is my riff on that idea - and a solution to the ‘books as status signals’ conundrum.”

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Norway’s world-beating ebook stupidity

The end-user license agreement is up at McSweeney’s: Congratulations on purchasing the newest iteration of our electronic readers, the Kindle Genius Browser. We have made this new device compatible with all previous versions of the e-book, but there are some new features we’d like to introduce.

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Introducing the Kindle Gutenberg Bookreader