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DRM hits a new low as Amazon hits the delete key

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nosh:
This morning, hundreds of Amazon Kindle owners awoke to discover that books by a certain famous author had mysteriously disappeared from their e-book readers. These were books that they had bought and paid for—thought they owned.
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http://pogue.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/07/17/some-e-books-are-more-equal-than-others/

Here's the quirky part - both Orwell books are freely downloadable Down Under.

4wd:
Here's the quirky part - both Orwell books are freely downloadable Down Under.-nosh (July 18, 2009, 04:12 AM)
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Don't worry, I'm sure the industrious people behind the FTA are working to correct that slight oversight in the copyright laws.

Dormouse:
If they sold something that wasn't theirs to sell, then I'm not sure that anyone can say that it is wrong for the items to be 'returned' and the money paid back to them.

The big issue is their ability to just take it back without any dialogue or warning. It really shows you who is in control with DRM - and a reason why I don't 'buy' anything with DRM I cannot disable. You cannot be sure that you have any control over what you have 'bought'. Or that they will stick to any reasonable terms of the 'license' they sell.

Carol Haynes:
One of the reasons I now refuse to have anything to do with DRMed eBooks. I have been stung by Amazon in the past (pre-Kindle) when they used to supply Acrobat based eBooks that included DRM and then had no ability to activate them because Amazon withdrew the product.

wraith808:
I buy books with DRM; I just don't use a closed model so this doesn't happen (I'm not saying couldn't- mostly because I'm not sure).  I use Fictionwise and Stanza.  When there was a problem, they gave the readers 3 months to download the books in question before they were deleted from their online bookshelf (not their devices).  In most cases, they gave the users new versions in another format (Microsoft Reader and Adobe Reader were the ones to blame, not the service- so they relicensed the books in question in their own format).  Of course, now that Fictionwise has been bought by B&N, I'm not sure how it would be handled in the future.  But since Fictionwise books are readable in a variety of applications on a variety of hardware, I'm less concerned about their access to the books once I download them.

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