DRM

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A community for the discussion of topics surrounding DRM, Digital Rights Management.

All media that DRM can be applied on can be discussed here, for example books, movies, music or games.

Digital rights management (DRM) is the management of legal access to digital content. Various tools or technological protection measures, such as access control technologies, can restrict the use of proprietary hardware and copyrighted works. DRM technologies govern the use, modification and distribution of copyrighted works (e.g. software, multimedia content) and of systems that enforce these policies within devices. DRM technologies include licensing agreements and encryption.

Wikipedia

Guides and useful tools

Quick and dirty way to rip an eBook from Android

2025 Guide for freeing books from Amazon (after D&T was removed)

Guide to Removing DRM From Amazon Kindle E-Books

Liberate your Kindle books before leaving Amazon (Tutorial)

How to setup Calibre to remove DRM from ebooks on Linux/Archive mirror

Guide on removing DRM from Kobo & Kindle eBooks (reddit mirror, Archive link)

Extracting content from an LCP "protected" ePub

DeDRM tools for eBooks: a plugin for Calibre for removing Adobe DRM, Obok etc.

Calibre eBook Management

Miscellaneous links

DRM - Frequently Asked Questions by DefectiveByDesign

Guide to DRM-Free Living by DefectiveByDesign

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submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by Yingwu@lemmy.dbzer0.com to c/drm@lemmy.dbzer0.com
 
 

Additions are welcome! Please post in the comments if you're missing any. While I realize other sources and shadow libraries exist, I want this list to be about supporting the sites, stores and authors that make an effort to supply legal, DRM-free alternatives.

Ebook Stores

Ebooks.com DRM-Free section

Weightless Books (Sci-Fi magazines)

StoryBundle

Smashwords

Angry Robot

Delphi Classics

Humble Bundle

Kobo's DRM free section

Publishers

Tor Books

Baen Books

Authors

Cory Doctorow (Sci-Fi)

Greg Egan (Sci-Fi)

Honor Raconteur (Fantasy/YA)

Juliet Marillier (Fantasy)

Brandon Sanderson on Bookshop.org (Sci-Fi, US-only)

Brandon Sanderson on eBooks.com (Sci-Fi)

Libraries

The Anarchist Library

The Internet Archive

Project Gutenberg (American/General Public Domain, has many other countries and languages as well)

Project Gutenberg Canada (Canadian Public Domain)

Project Gutenberg Australia (Australian Public Domain)

Standard eBooks (Formatted Public Domain eBooks)

French eBooks

Ebooks libres et gratuits (French Public Domain)

French Bibiliothèque Nationale's Gallica (French Public Domain)

Les classiques des sciences social, with a large selection of essays and academic papers

La bibliothèque numérique Romande (Swiss fiction)

7switch

Le Belial (Sci-Fi/Fantasy)

Dystopia Editions (Sci-Fi/Fantasy)

Nordic eBooks

Litteraturbanken (Swedish Public Domain)

Runeberg (Swedish Public Domain)

Nasjionalbiblioteket (Norwegian Public Domain)

The National Library of Finland (Finnish Public Domain)

Audiobooks

LibriVox (Narrated public domain eBooks)

Libro FM

Games

GOG

Itch

Zoom

Music

Bandcamp

7digital UK/7digital US

Qobuz

Honorable mention, SomaFM: free and non-commercialized internet radio.


A note, if your native language is for example German, Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, Polish or similar, you can usually find DRM-free ebooks in your native language through your national stores. The ePubs are usually just watermarked. This might be applicable to other countries as well, even though I'm aware that some countries like Japan or South Korea have even stricter DRM schemes than the English-speaking world.

More on DefectiveByDesign, Libreture and ButtonDown

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The pinned post hasn't been updated in a few months now, so making this new one. Also will be updating here while the pinned post isn't updated.

Sources will be divided into categories based on content types available, and so a same source may appear in multiple categories. And if a category becomes too overarching, please suggest how to better divide!

Also some cases of DRM are blurrier. Some may consider DRM-free as simply not requiring validation, while watermarks and other means of tracking the owner if the files are leaked may be seen as DRM to others. When I know about such cases, I will include the source in the list but with a note about the potential DRM measure.

And removing SomaFM until I figure out if it indeed allows downloading contents DRM-free.

And lastly, quoting the OP, additions are welcome! Please post in the comments if you're missing any. While I realize other sources and shadow libraries exist, I want this list to be about supporting the sites, stores and authors that make an effort to supply legal, DRM-free alternatives.

Now, onto the list!

Audiobooks

Ebooks

Games

Music

Videos

Misc

NSFW ones

  • Denpasoft - for manga and some times games and other contents
  • DLsite - mangas, video games, OSTs (rarely), ASMR audio tracks, videos and game assets. Also see notes.
  • Fakku - mainly mangas, some few games, and rarely OSTs.
  • IndieGala - for games
  • Jast USA - for games
  • Kagura Games (JP / International)
  • MangaGamer - iirc exclusively for games
  • Nutaku - do note Android games always have DRM. Other systems should be safe.
  • Winter Wolves - game publisher store

Notes

  • About Amazon US and games, it has a selection of DRM-free games in the store, but they seem to be slowly delisting the titles there, maybe due to most being at least about as young as Windows Vista.
  • About DLsite, mangas that have DRM will have a light green box under genres and file size, not mattering what the text says, and if using Dark Reader, the box becomes dark green, contrasting much better with the UI. Games and videos will have a blue box instead iirc, and with a much clearer and consistent warning. And for all cases, if still in doubt, "file format" above genres should help too.
  • About Itch, technically they don't have policies against DRM, but in what's probably almost a decade using it, I can hardly remember 4 titles which would use DRM. Numbers bloat if we consider titles that only give keys for other services, which iirc is against the rules but have to check, and games that run in the browser, but that through launchers (Itch app, Kitch, Mitch for Android, etc.) or itch-dl, you can download it to run as a local HTML project.
  • About Epic Games Store, there is no way to know upfront the DRM situation, so each games needs to be tested. Also iirc there are community projects to catalogue such cases, but I don't have any at hand.
  • About ITunes, both musics and music videos require the ITunes app for IOS, MacOS or Windows for buying and downloading.
  • About ITunes, at least on Windows 10, Apple Music links can be opened as ITunes links by replacing https for start itms and adding ?app=itunes at the end, and then running the resulting command on Windows' CMD. The same can't be achieved with movies, and yet to test music videos.
  • About Lexaloffle Games, only familiar with the PICO-8 side of the site, and to get the file for a given game there, it can be downloaded if it has a pink cartridge icon under their games' respective web players. To do it, click the icon, download the "image" that opens, and either run on the official player, recompile through the PICO-8 player, or play through emulators.
  • About Supraph Online, asked the guy behind IsThereAnyDeal once, and he said it's a company he sees retail stores in the Czech Republic, so appears legit to me.