Amazon Kindle doomed to repeat Big Brother moment
Most points totally missed.
I find the commentary on this little saga extraordinary. There seems to be a dominant idea that Amazon are somehow at fault morally, and that overall Amazon should behave exactly as their customers want, and not as the law requires.
The comment: ""I don't know of any other product anywhere where I can take physical possession after paying in full and still have it repossessed without warning or recourse." exemplifes a number of errors along this line.
First - you never had physical possession. You had information. There was no a single atom of matter that moved when the rights were revoked. You thought you bought the right to access information.
Secondly, anything you buy can be repossessed without warning or recourse. The fact that it happens rarely to most people does not mean it does not happen. The best example where people do run afoul of exactly this problem is buying used cars. If you buy a used car from someone, and it turns out that they did not own the car - typically because it was still under finance and legally belonged to the finance company, or the car was stolen, it does not matter if you bought the car in good faith. You lose it. It remains the properly of the real owner. Your only recourse is to try to get your money back from the person you gave the money to. Usually by suing them. It isn't fun. Many countries now institute registers of stolen and cars under lien that prospective buyers can use to discover if the car is encumbered. But if they don't check, they risk losing their money. The second mechanism is to require registered dealers to provide clear title - which means the dealer is legally forced to wear the pain - but this only occurs in some countries, and only applies to cars as a special case. Not to any other goods.
The point? Amazon, through no clear fault of their own, were selling something that belonged to someone else. They had no right to sell it, and the real owner was fully within their rights to both stop Amazon from selling it, and to have Amazon recover what had been sold. The fact that recovery consisted of invalidating a digital right, as opposed to the repo man putting your car on the back of a truck, is immaterial. If Amazon had sold you a physical copy of the book, and it turned out that the book was stolen, you would not own it. Legal title would reside with from whomever it was stolen. The only reason it might not be repossesed is that it would not be worth the effort. Not that the actual owner did not have a clear legal right to demand it back. If the book was some rare edition of bird prints or similar high value object, you can bet you would be forced to give it back. You would get your money back too, but you never owned the object. Purchasers of the digital rights to 1984 never owned those rights because they were never Amazons to sell. No difference.
The whole premis of the article is similarly wrong. Amazon did not promise that this will never happen again. Where "this" is revocation of digital rights to a book. So, it isn't that they are setting themselves up to break a promise. All they promised is that next time they do revoke rights they will do it with a more forthright and clear mechanism so that customers understand what is happening. But the rights will go, as they legally must.
