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Student Suing Amazon For Book Deletions

Posted by kdawson on from the incident-that-will-not-stay-down-the-memory-hole dept.

Stupified writes "High school student Justin Gawronski is suing Amazon for deleting his Kindle copy of Nineteen Eighty-Four (complaint, PDF), because doing so destroyed the annotations he'd created to the text for class. The complaint states: 'The notes are still accessible on the Kindle 2 device in a file separate from the deleted book, but are of no value. For example, a note such as "remember this paragraph for your thesis" is useless if it does not actually reference a specific paragraph.' The suit, which is seeking class action status, asks that Amazon be legally blocked from improperly accessing users' Kindles in the future and punitive damages for those affected by the deletion. Nothing in Amazon's EULA or US copyright law gives them permission to delete books off your Kindle, so this sounds like a plausible suit."

5 of 646 comments (clear)

  1. Re:1984 by stainless-steel-vash · · Score: 5, Informative

    Not all schools have it as required reading. I read it on my own while in High School, and currently re-reading it. We were assigned Brave New World, but not 1984. Kind of odd. I wonder, when this goes to court, will it be tried in Room 101? And if he loses, will he be deleted, or re-educated.

    --
    I'm so awesome I don't need a sig file -Me
  2. Re:This is really freakin' cool by TooMuchToDo · · Score: 5, Informative

    Won't work. If a contract is one-sided, with a huge benefit to one party but little benefit to the other ("fair exchange"), a judge will typically null the contract (in this case, a EULA).

  3. Re:Derivative work by pete-classic · · Score: 5, Informative

    Kindle customers now know to make a backup copy.

    I generally agree with your post. But this comment shows that you aren't very clear on how Kindle works. It's all wireless magic. I briefly used Kindle on iPhone. You "buy" a book and it just appears. If you have multiple devices they all know what page you're on. If you drop your Kindle in the tub, presumably you buy another one and all of the content reappears.

    It's all DRMed to high-heaven, and backup isn't on Amazon's agenda.

    -Peter

    PS: I'm also a generally happy Amazon customer. I'll buy their digital music, but not their digital books!

  4. Re:It's time for the Minute of Hate by astacom · · Score: 5, Informative

    Neil Postman. Quoted in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brave_New_World and a ref to "Postman, Neil (1985). Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business. USA: Penguin USA. ISBN 0-670-80454-1" is provided there.

  5. Re:This is really freakin' cool by TooMuchToDo · · Score: 5, Informative
    Umm, no. Whether something is a luxury item or not matters not at all in contract law. The principal still applies. You can sign a contract with an auto maker that says you own the car but they can take it back at anytime even if you own it, and they can come and *try* to take it, but a judge is going to bitchsmack them for the contract inequity, and nullify it.

    For more research, google "contract inequity"