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Student Suing Amazon For Book Deletions
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."
Why was the copy of 1984 deleted? Any reason given at all? Also, this hardly needs to come to a law suit if amazon just gives him another copy (and say, credit to his account for books or whatever). Of course, that way there would be no fat paycheck in it for the guy. I am assuming that the notes can be reattached to a new copy of a book quickly and easy; but even if they can't surely it can be done by one of their tech guys?
Insightful? Really!?
Yeah, fuck e-books. What is an e-book anyway? Just another file format. So fuck .txt files and fuck HTML.
This is not about deleting the book as much as it is about his annotations. Regardless of anyone's position on deleting the book, Amazon should never have deleted the customers notes. Those notes were created by the customer, and should not have been subject to deletion.
In the summary it says that the notes were not deleted... they just no longer have a context which makes them meaningful.
1984 is not such a voluminous tome.
The guy has his notes in a file. Very likely (and I don't have a Kindle or his notes on hand to verify this), they're placed in there in the order in which they were applied to the text.
So, theoretically, all he has to do is look at each note and re-read through 1984 and re-apply the labels he's missing. It's probable some of his notes are quite location-specific, creating markers with which he could then locate his current whereabouts and continue on.
Granted, if the notes in the text file are in "order of addition", he's screwed. Equally so if his notes consisted of simply underlining or tagging (without a label) areas of text (can you do this?) and now those are disassociated. That sort of thing defeats my data recovery proposal..
If the legal system had any particular desire to pursue criminal actions by corporations, Amazon could be in more trouble. I rather suspect that what they did is a felony in quite a few states, probably including Washington. There are laws against destroying data on other people's computer systems.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
So you think that this issue would have still risen to its current level of coverage if the books turned off were a couple of lurid bodice-ripper romance novels? Not likely. Do you think this is the first time Amazon has reached out to turn off a purchased book? More likely this is just the first time it was done to a book popular among to blogofied masses.
I judt got a nre Kinesis keybiartf so please excusr ant egregiou typos.
....or maybe he is willing to stand up and fight for his rights, and the rights of others.
In that case he would be campaigning to have the law changed to make such actions illegal and not trying to sue Amazon. Even if he is successful all they will do is change the licensing agreement to allow them to do this without being sued in the future. If he is really trying to stand up for his (and others) rights this is a stupid way to go about it....its also a stupid way to try and get some money. The only people who will get rich from this are the lawyers.