This Lego Robot Kills The DRM Protection In Your Kindle E-Books

DRM, or digital rights management, is the stuff that limits a consumer's capabilities with his or her purchased digital media. It's what curbs the iTunes music you buy to your own use specifically. It prevents you from sharing your paid-for Kindle books with others.

Peter Purgathoffer, an associate professor at the Vienna University of Technology, built a Lego robot that squashes Kindle e-book DRM, we learn via Boing Boing.

The robot works by repeatedly pressing the "next page" button on a Kindle, then snapping a picture of the new page with a laptop's webcam. Captured pictures are saved to a folder where they are automatically treated with a process called OCR - optical character recognition - which digitizes the text and turns it into a completely DRM-free e-book.

The best part of this little robotic creation is that because it's engaging in a transformative act (and is obviously for one's own personal use), it's legal.

DIY kindle scanner from peter purgathofer on Vimeo.

Disclosure: Jeff Bezos is an investor in Business Insider through his personal investment company Bezos Expeditions.