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DRM hits a new low as Amazon hits the delete key
f0dder:
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.
-Carol Haynes (July 18, 2009, 06:44 AM)
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:up:
40hz:
Makes me wonder what will happen down the road when governments decide they want to yank certain ebooks books off electronic shelves without any warning.
We sure seem to be giving up a lot of personal freedom just to have the 'freedom' of walking around with 100 books in our pocket.
Like the song says: Freedom's just another word for 'nothing left to loose.'*
If that's true, then I'd say we're well on our way to becoming free.
Welcome to the real Brave New World, brought to you courtesy of Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and all those other US companies - who bend over backwards to cooperate with repressive regimes and legislation - while incessantly denying they do so.
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*( Hope that quote from Kris Kristofferson's Me & Bobby McGee falls within the doctrine of Fair Use!)
Carol Haynes:
Welcome to the real Brave New World, brought to you courtesy of Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and all those other US companies - who bend over backwards to cooperate with repressive regimes and legislation - while incessantly denying they do so.
-40hz (July 18, 2009, 09:38 AM)
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Welcome to the new form of colonialism - who needs a physical empire when everything can be controlled electronically?
app103:
What amazon did was the digital equivalent of breaking into your home in the middle of the night and replacing a book on your table with a refund check.
And they didn't just take back what they sold to you. In at least one case, they took more. There was at least one student that had purchased one of the books in question, to complete a summer reading assignment. They took all his work, notes and annotations.
Amazon also violated their own licensing and terms of use agreement, which states that once you pay for a book it's yours forever, and they will not revoke your access to what you paid for unless YOU do something wrong. Nowhere in there does it say they will delete books if a publisher does something wrong. And as of today, that agreement still has not been changed.
In the physical book world, they could never get away with something like this. They would be treated as criminals if they even tried it.
In the physical book world, the publisher would have been held responsible for their breach of copyright, and if the copyright holder sued them and won, they would be made to pay the copyright holder for that violation, whatever money they made from the sale of those books in addition to some very stiff fines.
Those that had purchased the books would not have to return them. Additionally, I believe that once the publisher is found guilty, the purchaser would be entitled to a refund, if they took that publisher to small claims court or if it was ordered by the court to offer an optional refund to purchasers, making it even more expensive for the violating publisher. But again, nothing would force the end user to return the book for a refund. It would be their option.
Put it this way, in the physical book world, it's the unauthorized publisher that would be royally screwed for the violation, and not the end users. There is nothing in the law that punishes end users that purchase bootleg copies of books, in good faith.
And this whole incident raises another question with regards to Amazon. How carefully are they screening products they are selling to their customers?
nudone:
Welcome to the new form of colonialism - who needs a physical empire when everything can be controlled electronically?
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amen.
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