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'Winston Smith' Speaks Out On MS Reader Convertor

Posted by timothy on from the gotta-read-on-my-zaurus dept.

David H. Rothman writes "'Winston Smith,' an unemployed American high school dropout self-named after 1984's hero, told my TeleRead.org site why he and buddies turned out Convert Lit to crack the Microsoft Reader e-book format. Winston makes clear he is pro-fair use and anti-piracy. Alas, new DMCAish legal restrictions in the United Kingdom will force the Dan Jackson Software site to shut off the Convert Lit downloading later this month. Just as in the States, free speech and fair use apparently matter less in the UK these days than they used to. According to Dan Jackson, Winston 'is indeed the real author of Convert LIT.' Meanwhile, if you're in a country without DMCAish thuggery and can host Dan at a new location, email him ASAP."

3 of 192 comments (clear)

  1. Heh, later this month... by DrEldarion · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Stop downloads of it later this month? They may as well just leave it up, because by then there will be about a million different sites available to download it from. Especially now that the Slashdotters know about it, people will host it just to spite Microsoft.

    -- Dr. Eldarion --

  2. Where is Alan Cox in all of this? by bconway · · Score: 4, Interesting

    AC has always badmouthed the US as no longer "the land of the free" and made other off-the-cuff remarks, also saying that he'll be leaving his country if such laws were passed. Yet, suddenly, he's become very quiet. Does he have any plans of following through, or does he just make idle threats? I find it sad someone so prominent in this community would be all talk and no walk.

    --
    Interested in open source engine management for your Subaru?
  3. it does work by gooman · · Score: 5, Interesting

    All I can say is this thing helped me out of a jam a little while ago. The program is not polished by any means, but it does work.

    Our company had a document (Employee Handbook) converted into MS Reader format. (Don't ask me why.) The original files were lost in a disk crash. (Don't talk to me about backups either.) Now the document needs editing. I could have re-typed it, but I'm lazy. A quick Google and I find this program with a potentionaly offensive name.

    Hooray! I get to be lazy and violate the DMCA just to retreive a file owned and created by the company I work for. The incident only reinforced to everyone here the value of pdf files and that MS Reader is beyond worthless.

    --
    "Kittens give Morbo gas!"