Amazon Kindle doomed to repeat Big Brother moment Yes, Amazon chief Jeff Bezos has apologized for the Orwellian removal of Orwell from digital book readers tucked inside the pockets of American citizens. And yes, the new-age retailer has promised not to repeat its Big Brother moment. But that's not a promise it can promise to keep. Last week, Bezos and company vanished all …
I can see such a can of worms in this story.
Amazon showing the have the ability to "unpublish" a book whenever they want.
Multiple people that claim to be the rights holders (or know the copyright status of a book) - showing how hard it is to work out what is in public domain these days
Amazon making grandious statements that they can't possibly keep.
All of this just proves to me that Kindle should never ever be used for books, or if it is, should have a locked in ability not to allow it to be modified.
On the other hand...if they can unpublish content, then they can republish it, that would be erfect for things like newspapers and magazines...buy a subscription for a year, and get new issues downloaded automatically over the old one..include a function to allow users to prevent specific articles from undeleting when the next issue comes along and you'd actually have a product thats good for something.
Kindle just seems like a good idea that isn't goign to work becasue Amazon looks at it and thinks "BOOKS"
http://www.theregister.co.uk/Design/graphics/icons/comment/big_brother_32.png
Amazon didn't take this far enough
Google needs to launch a similar book reader .. and require that all purchases do so using Google Check out and a GMail email address.
Then they can take it a step further and instead of giving a refund ... edit history so that the purchase never happened.
"Amazon's terms of service say its ebooks are licensed - not sold. But its marketing boilerplate describes the Kindle as a device for "your library" and "your books." The company didn't break its user contract. But it messed with some peace of mind."
Okay, I have no problem with the TOS saying that the books are licensed. But when they are marketed as "belonging", I would think that they're committing some sort of fraudulent advertising. When I saw an ad last week for the Kindle on Amazon, there was no mention, anywhere, about the "fact" that the books were licensed.
Even Microsoft, when it licenses software, doesn't (so far) unilaterally revoke that license.
IANAL, but I've seen plenty of these "contracts" ruled unenforcable because of the one sided nature of the terms.
It strikes me that the "purchasers" of these books did so in good faith.
>that the writer's rights were successfully protected thanks to technology<
This particular writer has been dead since Jan 1950, so I doubt he cares, also, the copyright had finished, so, if anything, Amazon should of let its customers have those titles for free, not charge them - as you can do so here, legally...
http://www.planetebook.com/1984.asp
except, of course, you can't read PDFs on the Kindle, it is totally proprietary.
Epic Fail!
"As the husband of a writer, and barring security concerns, I am actually happy to hear this story and that the writer's rights were successfully protected thanks to technology."
Presumably you also think that your wife's work should parasitically continue to rake in money for you / fund your lifestyle long after she's dead?
Anyway, this isn't about protecting the rights of authors. It's about when an item you've purchased becomes your property or not. I have to agree with Dillon Pyron - if the EULA is illegal, it doesn't matter what it says, the actions of Amazon were unacceptable.
I'm not a Kindle fan, I prefer physical books. Would Amazon have broken into my house to retrieve a hookey copy? Of course not. So why did they think that this was okay?
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.
But there are no winners here. The rights-holders aren't losing profits, because there are no legal Kindle versions for customers to buy.
Couldn't they have gone to Amazon and said "Oi! I own the rights. You can carry on selling them as long as I get my share of the profits."? Everyone is happy.
There was clearly a market for the two ebooks. I have no sympathy with anyone who choses not to market a product, but complains when Amazon publishes an unauthorised version.
There's a similar issue with territorial restrictions on many Mobipocket books. I wouldn't buy a US paper book if there was a UK version, but this is never the case with ebooks.
Nobody benefits from these restrictions. And if a book is out of print, nobody loses out if you download a copy from a torrent.
Rights-holders need to come to terms with the Internet and ebooks.
I'm afraid I'm going to piss in your chips because you've clearly not stopped and thought about this - it's very dangerous to your livelyhood and you don't see it.
This is the sort of thing that could easily trigger a huge public backlash, quite possibly a significant boycott of a publisher - maybe 'your' publisher.
If that happens, your income will plummet - although your 'rights' have been protected, your interests haven't.
If your publisher has you tied to an exclusive contract - as most do - then you don't have the option of jumping ship to another one as you've already sold your ass to this one and they'll make sure you never write for anybody else until they're sure your rights are worthless.
'Rights' are all very well, but you can't eat them, or live in them.
I hope you own a tent.
"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.
In the UK if you buy stolen goods (unknowingly or otherwise) they don't belong to you and can be repossessed by the owner. Any recourse would be with the seller, who is probably in court anyway.
Hopefully people will start to wake up to the real nature of DRMs.
So far, in the mind of most people DRMs were something that only affects those greedy pirates and nerdy teenagers who want to make illegal copies of songs and movies. They will begin to understand that DRMs are about control, not about stopping copying.
DRMs mean that the information remains under control of its original vendor and he can modify and withdraw it at his discretion. You only have access to this information by the grace of the publisher and "out of his own hands".
Not only you need to find what you want and pay for it - you also need to pray daily that your vendor will be in a good mood and not take it all away from you if he feels like that.
For the first time the information that has been published can be revoked and unpublished. Imagine this could be done to the Guttenberg Bible - where would we be now?
At the moment only business is playing with this new concept, which is already bad - the IP owners are already in the strong position to manipulate and abuse their respective markets and they are actively doing it (and husbands of writers would be better off directing their wrath at their publishers rather than at the public). But wait till this idea will dawn upon a few governments!
As far as the person mentioned in the article who professes to not know of any other product that can be repossessed at the whim of its vendor - he should just look at BluRay. Not only your ability to play BD titles you buy can be revoked by spreading revocation codes on subsequently published discs, but even the players themselves can be disabled by the same mechanism.
... anywhere where I can take physical possession after paying in full and still have it repossessed without warning or recourse"
.... Jeff has clearly never bought a stolen car. Every so often news/documentaries do an item on some car theft ring (imports from Japan are a particular issue) and show people being told that (a) the car they bought was stolen, (b) as such they have no rights to it and (c) its going to be towed away immediately so it can be returned to its rightful owners.
Actually there is one difference ... the Amazon customers get their money back
Isn't this rather lazy journalism? What I mean is, how is protecting the intellectual rights of the copyright owner "Orwellian"? In Nineteen Eighty-Four, that phrase would refer to Winston Smith's job at the Ministry of Truth, re-writing history to make the pronouncements of Big Brother look like they came true.
Steve Jobs admitted that there was a kill switch but that it had not been used yet. If Apple ran into a similar situation, there's every possibility that they could do the same, even though they state that it's just for killing 'malicious or inappropriate' apps.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/3358134/Apples-Jobs-confirms-iPhone-kill-switch.html
Amazon could do with have some sort of messaging interface on the Kindle to flag up important messages such as the revocation of a license directly to the user. In every other regard, they've acted entirely correctly: this "I bought this item which was subsequently found to be illegal in good faith so I should be able to keep it" argument just does not wash, I'm afraid, as Amazon sold it in good faith.
The surprise is that anyone's finding Amazon's communication with its customers to be anything other than piss-poor, or have we all managed to forget the days when they wouldn't even give out a number you could call when they inevitably fucked your order up?
Ignoring the technical implications for a moment, There is a parallel between this and stolen goods. Though the buyers acted in good faith, my understanding is if an item you bought is found to have been stolen, you as the subsequent buyer have no rights to it, and can have it taken off you. your only recourse is against the seller/ reseller, which here was also acting in good faith, and has issued refunds. Amazon should not have suffered such bad publicity because of this, as it did everything by the book, and should really have stern words with the publisher that listed it. It should however have explained why.
I should point out that i do still sympathise as i don't like the idea of anyone having absolute control over a device i bought.
Perhaps I'm oversimplifying here, but wouldn't a far more PR friendly move have been for Amazon to:
1) Stop selling copies of both books on the Kindle store.
2) Compensate the rights holder in full for every copy that was sold, even if it means paying over the standard rate.
3) Sue the shit out of the distributor that put it there in the first place, thus retrieving all the money spent at 2).
4) Tell the world how great you are and how you stood up for your customers.
Right now the amount of business that they have lost must be way in excess of the cost of compensating the rights holder for a few thousand books.
...and quacks like a duck, then it's a duck.
Likewise, if it looks like a sale and transacts like a sale, then it should be considered a sale...and therefore one-way (than again, IANAL). After all, when you obtain books for your Kindle, do you not "buy" those books? If it's not truly buying, then should not Amazon and any other e-tailer whose products can be subject to server-side revocation be barred from using the term "buy" in their shopping pages?
This incident goes way beyond copyright. What about "take down" injunctions against Amazon for titles or material that happens to rile or offend particular special interests? For example, how about these: "DIY Abortion"; "Secrets of Scientology"; "Inside Today's MI6"; ... the possibilities are endless.
I think it is a bit pretentious of you to display your opinion on kindle and magazines like you have an original and interesting idea, and that Amazon is dumb compared to you and that's why they'll fail, because they don't have the same sooo original and clever ideas.
It shows mainly that:
- You must be very proud of yourself to state something so obvious to everyone. Sorry, but the magazine subscription idea has been old news ever since day 1 of the Kindle (or even before)
- You talk about things you know very little about, because if you had followed a tiny weeny bit the kindle news reports, you couldn't have missed the buzz about the possibility of having magazine subscriptions
- Even when you copy idea and think you invented them, you actually make them worse: why ever would there be a reason to remove the previous issue of a magazine? It should be obvious they have to stay on the kindle so you can go back to previous issues if you want (and then it's only a matter of display that the newest issue is by default the one proposed to you on the screen).
In the end, you should try to remember that there are generally people thinking hard about the issue, and while there are often blunders or missed ideas, you generally shouldn't assume that's the case and you know better until you know the subject very, very well.
"As the husband of a writer, and barring security concerns, I am actually happy to hear this story and that the writer's rights were successfully protected thanks to technology. :)"
The writer's rights have NOT been protected. He has been dead these 50 years...
But some faceless company now 'owns' the right to let you see his books. It is THEIR 'rights' that are being protected - their 'right' to tax people for eternity to view something which used to be a free gift from our past to all humankind.
Car are altogether different matter. Car market is different from any other markets. The ownership of all cars is required to be registered with a government agency with every buyer of a vehicle being under legal obligation to inform DVLA of the change in ownership.
On the other hand it is impossible for a buyer to reliably establish provenance of books, kettles, tomatoes, flowers or sausages. Moreover, it is not required to do so and if you buy a sausage, that happens to have been stolen, from Tesco no one can send a bailiff to rip it out of your stomach.
Equally, if I buy a book from Waterstones and if you are a husband of a writer and if you come to me trying to take that book away - you will end up with a black eye and a law suit for attempted robbery on your hands.
It used to be that copyright, in Berne Convention countries, lasted for 50 yerars after the author's death.
And the USA had a different system: registration, a fixed term, and optional extension.
The USA switched to a Berne Convention system, with some transition arrangements which make some works published in the 1960s, Public Domain in the USA.
Both the EU and the USA then extended the copyright term. Orwell remains in copyright in these places. In other parts of the world, maybe not. For instance, Orwell is out of copyright in Australia, because of the different transition arrangements, and the date the extension took effect.
Obviously, with these differences, an international publishing and distribution operation has possible problems. Perhaps Amazon's big mistake was the deletion--what evidence did they need to go beyond a simple halt to sales?
Perhaps it's lucky that very few books are worth anything to a publisher after about ten years. But perhaps ebooks are one of the few places where some sort of "long tail" might work. And maybe this is driven by illusions of profit that haven't quite crumbled away.
Finding out what books can be sold (or licenced) to Kindle owners (or bearers) in different locations, and when, must be difficult, so Amazon has come up with an ingenious way around the problem. Sell (or licence) *all* books to *anyone*, and wait to see if anything happens. Then at the first hint of trouble BAM! Problem solved.
I can see how some customers might get the funny idea that this is not so good for them.
Amazon destroyed *books*. The fact they were e-books stored in flash memory is irrelevant. They *destroyed books*.
The apology was a good start but far from sufficient. Bezos should have publically committed Amazon to never repeating this action, as a corporate promise with legally binding force, and removed the capability from the Kindle.
Failing that, only complete boycott of Amazon is sufficient response.
As such, not only will I never buy a Kindle, I will never buy another Amazon product, and I will (and have) told as many people as I know never to buy from Amazon again.
A small thing, but if enough people do it Amazon can be dealt a groin shot that will bring them crashing to their knees (and their senses).
Boycott them. Until they learn book burning is going to put them out of business.
"Car are altogether different matter. Car market is different from any other markets. The ownership of all cars is required to be registered with a government agency with every buyer of a vehicle being under legal obligation to inform DVLA of the change in ownership."
The reason is twofold. 1. To allow the police to find the owners of cars that have been observed breaking the law. 2. To track ownership. Note, in neither case does registration have any control upon who owns the car - that remains exactly the same as any other object that can be bought or sold. Cars have been used as an example of the law, not any different, just something most people can relate to. If you buy a car that is registered in the name of the person you bought it from, but it is still under finance, you still lose the car. Registration does not prove or determine ownership.
"Equally, if I buy a book from Waterstones and if you are a husband of a writer and if you come to me trying to take that book away - you will end up with a black eye and a law suit for attempted robbery on your hands."
No, you will end up on an assult charge, and you will find yourself in a very murky world. You own the physical book. But the words in that book you have no right to. The authors of the book could have previously gone to court and obtained a judgement that all illegally published books become their property. Then you would legally have no title to the book. And would have to give it back. Again the point being that just becuse you gave some company money for something does not automatically give you ownership. If I steal your TV, and then sell it to someone else, you stil own it. Or would you prefer it your way?
The neat thing about the Amazon issue is that it neatly divides the issue of the physical object from the information.
There is still a stream of idiotic comments above that just don't get it. Boycott Amazon because they obey the law? Great. What Amazon did was a bit ham fisted, but in the end exactly correct. They had no choice. They either invalidated they rights, or they ended up in court, and would most clearly have lost - and then they would have invalidated the rights.
It doesn't matter how you like to view the world, or how you would like the world to be, it simply isn't that way. If you don't understand how the world works, or would like the laws changed, well there are ways of remedying that which are legal. But it would be a grea idea to get your head around what the fundamentals are. What we see above is an astounding amount of ignorance and rather typical modern self centered opinion.
"No, you will end up on an assult charge, and you will find yourself in a very murky world."
Disagree completely: If I know I bought a NEW book from Waterstones and somebody tells me they own it and try taking it back, it's attempted robbery. Are we now expected to research any court cases surrounding the book we want to buy? The publisher should prevent the retailer from continuing selling the book, and recoup losses from the retailer.
What's insane (and it's been caught by several people) is that the publisher didn't want the royalties due for the unauthorised sale of the books, but just wanted the books deleted. I thought these companies are in it for the money. Here we are in a recession and they're throwing away potential sales.
What a fantastic way to piss off your customers. I for one will be buying my copy of 1984 & Animal Farm from a 2nd hand book shop or Oxfam.
Well, Francis, I don't think you are getting it either.
The books are sold without recourse as far as the rights of IP owners are concerned. If you buy a book in a book shop and it turns out that the book shop did not have the rights to the sell book you still get to keep the book.
If the book was stolen, perhaps the previous owner could try to get it back but it will take a legal process to do it. The previous owner will have to prove that it was his property and that this particular book ended up in my possession.
So, in either case no one can break into my house and repossess the books I have without resorting to proper process - you'll still get that black eye and the law suit.
With Amazon - they bypassed any legal processes. They became the justices and law enforcement agents at the same time.
They did not HAVE to design their gadget to allow this to be done, yet they chose to do so. This was done for the specific purpose of changing the rules of the game. This is what is unacceptable and I hope one day you will see why.
That is one without the might of Amazon, they would have been forced to swallow the loss, and recompense the copyright owners whilst allowing all happy Kindle holders continued access to 1984 or whatever.
Why is it that whenever a big corporation makes a "mistake" they get their customers to pay for it?
Tish!
This is not, as regards the copyrigth owner, a case of theft: it's a case of copyright violation. Nothing was initially stolen; the owner was deprived of nothing.
People need to grasp the idea that just because a lot of big companies say that copyright violation is theft does not make it so.
In the Kindle case, Amazon should simply have paid the supposed copyright owners (I assume this is just some bunch of parasites) instead of stealing their customers' books. Because that is actually what they did: the book owners WERE deprived of their property, unlike the copyright holders. The Kindle "licence" is a joke that would not hold up in any court for many reasons. The people who bought those representations of 1984 paid for them and the sale was a legal transfer of ownership of that representation; the fact that it was not a transfer of the copyright is irrelevant.
Havng said all that, the correct solution is to not buy Kindle and to lobby your MP to reform copyright back to a sensible duration; there is no good reason why these books should still be controlled by anyone today.
The legal issues mentioned in the article show the importance of a splitting between the content provider and the machine itself. Amazon controlling too many pieces in the chain of literary distribution is very dangerous. I read a very interesting discussion on the kindle on Pandalous:
http://www.pandalous.com/topic/is_the_world_ready_for .
They speak both on its possibility for developing new kinds of art, but also the dangers it brings with it.
IANAL but I think that Amazon did the right thing by pulling the content. Like its been said, they didn't have the right to sell it and they'd refund their customers. So there's no loss.
Okay a few people didn't get what they want. But hey, thats life. You can't always have what you want. ( I can, you can't :p )
Where I in Amazon's shoes I'd have done exactly the same thing, but not made the promise at the end that it would never happen again.
"Boycott Amazon because they obey the law?"
They didn't obey the law. They *extended* the law--without the force of government (do what we say or we kill you) on their side.
There were any number of legitimate solutions that did not involve book burning. If I own a physical book (even one published without permission) the *publisher* is on the hook, not the customer. I own the book. No one has the right to claim otherwise. (And the "law" of eminent domain does not apply here).
Boycott *is* the appropriate response. Amazon did an amazing stupid thing. They have to learn that they do not "license" content, they *sell* copies of it. End of story. Copyright is about the right to copy. It does not dictate anything about the illegal copies once made--only the penalty for having made those copies. If you don't believe me read the US Copyright code. (And yes, this is a US matter since Amazon is a US company).
And no, software EULA's are still a legal gray area that has never been tested. Ever. Like a book, software cannot be controlled by copyright beyond the right to physically copy (and/or distribute) the work.
And before anyone has the dim-bulb idea that software is different because it copied into memory to execute better think again. A *BOOK* is copied into human memory every time it is read. There is no difference in terms of "copying for use".
Both a software copied into memory and a book copied into human memory are transient copies, not permanent. Both are encoded representations of instructions. After all, when you read you are translating symbols into meaning. Therefore there is little conceptual difference between computers and brains (in this one limited aspect).
Since copyright law *requires* the ability to read copies of books (that is, after all, the desired end result of selling a book!) the same is true for software. So don't even bother with EULA arguments please.
Besides, merely erasing the copies has no effect on Amazon's legal liabilities--they are *STILL* on the hook for those 18,000 copies. Thus it makes no sense to have erased them. The infringment already occurred, erasing existing copies doesn't make it go away.
Just ask RIAA... :)
Fahrenheit 451 is the story about burning books. Orwell is so passe these days!
Never could understand the appeal of the Kindle - and I always thought the device would be kindling to start some kind of bonfire. This story simply confirms my worst fears.
Sure, what they did might have been legal, but that still doesn't make it right.
Some of us remember when we used to actually visit libraries and flip pages as we read - all without fear of the 'Fire Department' kicking the doors down and torching the greats of literature.
Perhaps Amazon should stick to selling shoes? No one minds when we walk all over those.
This isn't the same as stolen goods though: it is closer to a person buying a CD at a record store, only to get home and find that it is a CD-R rather than an authorised copy.
It is the person making the copies who is liable here, and they're guilty of copyright infringement even if they come into your home and destroy the CD-R after the fact.
So if the rights holder was intent on suing, then Amazon's actions wouldn't stop them.
blah blah DRM. blah blah book burning. blah blah big brother blah blah backlash. You really don't get it do you? the public don't give a monkeys. joe public loves the kindle in the states, and when it comes here , it will sell like hot cakes. hasn't the ipod/iphones/itunes store taught you anything ? Market forces will decide this not whining geeks.
They're ripoff expensive..
Saw some cheap looking elonex things in Borders the other day. I figured they were about £20 of cheap LCD in a plastic box (which is exactly what they looked like). There was no price and the salesdroid didn't know what they cost as they'd just arrived.
Googled it. £189.. lol. On what planet? Damned thing wasn't even waterproof and reading in the bath is probably where I do most of my reading these days... drop a book you wait for it to dry out and carry on. Drop one of these things and you're out a considerable amount of money, plus all the books you downloaded to the device are lost.
Probably the kindle solves a lot of this, given that it seems to be popular in the US.. I await the £50 waterproof kindle to appear. Ebooks might become viable then.
Hmmm, on second thoughts, and perhaps rather unusually for an open forum, I think I am swayed by the above. Wolf 1 - very well put argument second time, terrible the first. (Note - book burning is the province of totalitarian regimes - you were one step away from invoking Godwin's law - as opposed to making sense. Second time makes very good sense.)
"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."
If you buy a stolen car in this country (UK) is it not the case that the real owner can reclaim it; and if the thief is never caught, you don't even get your money back.
And this, effectively, is what happened, no? They bought something that was stolen, and when it was discovered that it was stolen, they had to give it back?
So while it might be a bit naughty of Amazon to try to market 'ownership' when it is actually licensing, the whole episode is hardly without precedent.
One way to avoid Big Brother is to stop buying his products. Really, I just cannot understand why people still put their trust in these big companies with their "innovative" ideas that promise you heaven on earth, but are in fact just clever traps to take full control over your life as a customer. Even if Amazon promises not to remove content from customer's devices anymore, doesn't it bother anyone that Amazon always knows exactly what you're reading and when you're reading it?
Please also take a look at this and try to connect the dots:
"Don't Let Google Close the Book on Reader Privacy!"
http://www.sott.net/articles/show/189819-Don-t-Let-Google-Close-the-Book-on-Reader-Privacy-
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