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Jeff Bezos Offers Apology For Erasing 1984
levicivita writes "From the down-but-not-out NYT comes an article (warning: login may be required) about user backlash against Kindle's embedded DRM: 'Last week, Jeffrey P. Bezos, chief executive of Amazon, offered an apparently heartfelt and anguished mea culpa to customers whose digital editions of George Orwell's "1984" were remotely deleted from their Kindle reading devices. Though copies of the books were sold by a bookseller that did not have legal rights to the novel, Mr. Bezos wrote on a company forum that Amazon's "'solution' to the problem was stupid, thoughtless and painfully out of line with our principles."' Bezos's post is here."
Amazon has refunded their customers according to the article, but if I was halfway through a book and it got deleted from my device I would be very annoyed. To me it seems that the better solution would be for Amazon to arrange the correct rights from the copyright holder and arrange some form of deal to make sure that those who have a copy of the book on their Kindle can continue to use it or receive a new copy with the proper rights and at no cost. In the end, the material was offered through their service and they do have responsibility to their customers, even if it is not illegal for them to use this solution.
The apology posted from Mr. Bezos sounds heartfelt indeed. I wonder how this will be handled in future incidents like this one. Unfortunately, in the Netherlands we do not have access to the Kindle. But even with the risks of allowing Amazon to retain control to remotely delete items you have purchased I would definitely be a customer for the device. I suppose that with products like these you have to decide whether you trust a supplier or not.
is out of the bag now Bezos
i was interested in a DX but now ill just get a laptop
this is yet another reason not to buy a kindle, how many other geeks out there feel same way now ?
"'solution' to the problem was stupid, thoughtless and painfully out of line with our principles."
You forgot ironic. The big brother connotations on this scandal makes the whole story somewhat funny even.
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It would be 1984 they do this to. To quote Bart Simpson "The ironing is delicious".
Cruise TT
Just got a lot cooler with a hot gadget like the Kindle.
used book store
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
If Amazon truly wanted to fix their mistake, they would restore the book to the affected Kindles (and work out a deal with the rightholders themselves, maybe).
Unless Amazon sees to it that the last thing remotely deleted is their ability to remotely delete, their "apology" is just so much eloquent PR posturing.
1984 declared non-purchase.
Read is thoughtcrime.
Doublethink. Just get the customers to think that there never was such a book, and that they hadn't read it half way through.
If this is out of line with Amazon's principles, then why does the technology to remotely delete books exist?
If you really want to restore faith in your customers how about completely unlocking their kindles and let them decide what they do and do not delete? Or perhaps that's too much heart for Bezos.
I doubt he'd have a single "heartfelt" thing to say if he wasn't dragged over the hot coals of the net.
Repeat after me: Death to DRM. Terminate all instances of DRM in all cases. The user's content is the user's fair use. Resist DRM until death
Comment removed based on user account deletion
The statement, from Amazon's Drew Herdener, reads:
These books were added to our catalog using our self-service platform by a third-party who did not have the rights to the books...When we were notified of this by the rights holder, we removed the illegal copies from our systems and from customers' devices, and refunded customers....
We are changing our systems so that in the future we will not remove books from customers' devices in these circumstances.
As highlighted by the WSJ, the case draws attention to an expectation gap between real books and their digital counterparts: the latter is simply a license to read the content on your device.
"Kill 'em all and let Root sort 'em out"
... until they can convince me beyond reasonable doubt that they removed the ability to delete books on their customer's devices.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
they did already
http://boingboing.net/2009/07/20/amazons-orwellian-de.html
it was the works of orwell that were removed.
not just one book
liqbase
I'm sure Mr. Bezos can afford advisors who know that that is the key to "sincerity" and can coach him on how to achieve it.
However, they still consciously and deliberately designed their system so as to allow them to remove material from Kindle owners' machines without their knowledge or permission. Why would anyone trust a company that would do that? Have they removed that functionality and explained why it was there in the first place?
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Slightly offtopic, but many people don't know Orwell's original introduction to the Animal Farm was censored because it was anti-Soviet. It's a telling sign of how easy it is to get the entire media to wholly invest in obvious lies at the order of government and business interests. The enemy of my enemy...
The servility with which the greater part of the English intelligentsia have swallowed and repeated Russian propaganda from 1941 onwards would be quite astounding if it were not that they have behaved similarly on several earlier occasions. On one controversial issue after another the Russian viewpoint has been accepted without examination and then publicized with complete disregard to historical truth or intellectual decency. To name only one instance, the BBC celebrated the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Red Army without mentioning Trotsky. This was about as accurate as commemorating the battle of Trafalgar without mentioning Nelson, but it evoked no protest from the English intelligentsia. In the internal struggles in the various occupied countries, the British press has in almost all cases sided with the faction favoured by the Russians and libelled the opposing faction, sometimes suppressing material evidence in order to do so.
http://home.iprimus.com.au/korob/Orwell.html
It cannot possibly have been a "brain fart". The decision to design the system so as to make this sort of thing possible has to have been conscious and deliberate. Giving their managers to the power to remove material from your Kindle was clearly a policy decision.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Talk is cheap, and it costs nothing to apologise. Clearly, this is an attempt to mollify angry customers, and nothing more. This is rather typical of Amazon's contempt for their customers. They've demonstrated through their actions -- imposing odious DRM on their paying customers, and setting a dangerous precedent for Big Content to rape their customers at will -- that they cannot be trusted.
Trust is very hard to build and very easy to destroy. I will not spend a red cent with Amazon again.
Interestingly, beyond Jeff's cheap talk, they seem to be showing very little remorse. All my enquiries to their "customer" "service" contact either get a form letter, or are ignored entirely. Likewise, my requests to them to close my account have been ignored.
Amazon doesn't deserve your business. Don't shop with Amazon, and spend your money with book retailers who show their customers at least a token amount of respect.
A wise person once said "sometimes it is easier to seek forgiveness than permission". I think that we are seeing that phrase in action.
HEY BEZOS: PEOPLE OWN WHAT THEY PAY FOR.
I just paid a friend a penny for the entire western hemisphere.
Now GET OFF MY LAND!
This is a substitute for a clever sig that fits within the maximum number of characters.
... yes, designed to allow refunds. Which they do.
As I said upthread, they should have given all of these people a legit copy of the book at their own expense when they realized what happened, but it's entirely possible that this was an unforeseen consequence of the system. Personally, I'd rather it just didn't allow refunds, and told you to be careful what you bought, but I'm not Amazon.
Last time I checked, the free market didn't truly exist.
You don't seem to understand, breaching a computer system, unauthorized access to a computer through a network is a felony. I doubt any of the Kindle owners ever signed an Eula (at purchase????) and authorized Amazon to take the book off. Maybe I'm wrong, and at the purchase of every book there is an Eula that says they get to fuck you in the ass and have the resulting baby from it too.
All I know is if a private person were to do the same, they'd be headed to jail if caught.
I'm sure the flash drive has definite traces, unless they took care to explicitly overwrite the memmory it occupied(which I doubt).
The right of first sale, The purchaser bought the book in good faith. The seller, who sold illegally can turn over the list of people they sold that book to, and the police can track down all those people and confiscate their kindles while an expert deletes the book from each of them. If the consumers had purchased dead tree copies of the book that Amazon had sold illegally, Amazon would not be allowed to trespass into each person's house and remove the book. So why is it that they are allowed to trespass into our digital property and steal (as in I paid and had it, now I don't) from us?
Unfortunately, that would be costly and expensive, so instead they just overstep their bounds and deleted the files themselves. While claiming that the customers had only purchased a revocable license to read the content of the book.
Personally, I'd really like to see some of these cases of license to view content vs sale of property get into a court. Because as it stands now, consumers are on the significantly shorter end of the stick. Heck I'd love to see Congress be proactive, but the odds of that happening are about slim to nil.
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
Having the ability is not the main problem.
They may have the ability. But do they and should they have the legal right to do so?
Hackers have all sorts of abilities. They have the right to break into their own computers and delete their own data. But it's illegal in most countries for them to do it to other people's computers without permission.
So in this case:
1) Are all the Kindles owned by Amazon?
2) Is it reasonable to consider that the Kindle buyers have given Amazon the permission to do what they did?
3) Was the content/data illegally sold by Amazon or by someone else?
If Amazon was just providing a payment service like "Visa/Mastercard" and a shopping mall for shop owners to sell their stuff in, I don't see how that gives Amazon the right to stick their nose in other people's businesses and delete that content, just because it happens to be illegal. Go call the cops, or kickout the shop owners.
It's a different thing if the customers wanted to return the book for a refund (because somehow due to a screw up the wrong book was downloaded), then Amazon provides a "goods return and refunding" service for the customers and the shopowners to _voluntarily_ use.
I can hire a locksmith to go break into my house to return a book I took by mistake. But I'd be rather pissed off if the department store gets their guys over to do the same thing when I didn't ask them to.
Leave the breaking, entering and confiscation to the cops. Then at least we only need to worry about and keep an eye over just one bunch of thugs.
At the rate things go maybe in the future a General Genetic's franchisee might gene modify your wife, but then General Genetics sends thugs to "downgrade" her because they made a mistake. And go after your kids when they find out you had children - unauthorized reproduction of General Genetic's property.
So if Amazon has stepped out of line, they need to be smacked for it. You cannot just "leave it to the market", leaving it to the market means those with the most money have the most votes.
This gets more absurd (and ironic).
You can read the book free this web site. http://www.george-orwell.org/1984
Pssst! Only people from Oceania are allowed to read it... If you read it as an Eurasian, you have committed thought crime and must purge it from your brain!
(This is because Australia had a Life+50 copyright policy until 2004, so Orwell, Woolfe, Lovecraft and others are in the public domain. No longer, alas -- the US government have "convinced" them to adapt Life+70...)
Maybe I'm wrong, and at the purchase of every book there is an Eula that says they get to fuck you in the ass and have the resulting baby from it too.
Ah, the sad state of sex education today...
"Anyone who [rips a CD] is probably engaging in copyright infringement." - David O. Carson
[the] 'solution' to the problem was stupid, thoughtless and painfully out of line with our principles
Principles aren't something that you talk about, they are something that you do.
And Amazon certainly stood behind it's principles when it wiped the book, by acting.
The only thing Amazon is upset about is the backlash from consumers against their actual principles.
So, they go on to say "oh, no! we REALLY have these different principles, pay no attention to what we actually did".
You have to wonder if Jeff actually wrote it, or if the PR and marketing departments had their hand in the piece. That would be another "principle" derived from actions. Perhaps a good writing fingerprint program could tell you...
Regards.
If the public is ever going to see and understand what DRM is, and the danger it represents, we need more incidents like this. Especially incidents noteworthy enough to get mainstream media coverage. As things stand now, the average electronic device user has no clue about DRM. Articles and issues like this can hopefully change this... eventually.
If Amazon really cared about their customers, they'd remove the facility that allows them to delete user content from user devices.
Even the capacity is unthinkable. Amazon is always trying to see just how much invasiveness they can get away with.
There are other aggregators out there . . .