This LEGO bot combats DRM. Designed by Peter Purgathofer the Mindstorms bot holds a Kindle, flips through pages and takes pictures. He stresses this was a private project, not part of the Vienna University of Technology, not an invitation or instruction on how to get around digital rights management. Instead, Purgathofer explains this is a thought experiment.
That said; he’s clearly not happy with the concept of DRM. He notes;
In 2002, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos wrote in an open letter to the authors guild: »When someone buys a book, they are also buying the right to resell that book, to loan it out, or to even give it away if they want. Everyone understands this.« [http://oreillynet.com/pub/wlg/1291]
A few years later, his company built a device that effectively violates the very ideas he expressed in this statement.
The DIY kindle scanner is an art installation reflecting this loss of rights Jeff Bezos first defended for us, but then chose to remove. It also is a statement about the futility of DRM.
