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Amazon Offers To Return Pulled Orwell Ebooks
Back in July, Amazon faced public outrage over their decision to delete ebook copies of 1984 and Animal Farm from the Kindles of customers who purchased them. Shortly thereafter, CEO Jeff Bezos offered an apology, acknowledging that Amazon handled the situation in a "stupid" and "thoughtless" manner. Now, they're offering something more substantial: anyone who had an ebook deleted can now have it restored, apparently with annotations intact. Any customer who isn't interested in a new copy can get either an Amazon gift certificate or a check for $30.
I think that the damage has already been done. Amazon handled the situation poorly and when confronted about the situation took a lot more time to attempt to remedy the problem than was necessary to degrade their image.
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
I'm amazed it happened with an Orwell book too... Damn it 1984 was not an instruction manual!
...this would make it better:
"The new firmware update for the Kindle removes the remote deletion capability. We pledge [in some legally binding fashion] that this capability will never be reactivated."
Unfortunately, I don't see that happening.
I would really like to see Amazon make a commitment to not allowing purchased e-books to ever be pulled from the e-book readers of it's customers. I would like for them to think of e-books like people think of physical books in terms of ownership. If a bookstore sells me an illegal or stolen copy of a book by mistake, they damn sure can't come into my house and take it back.
Companies want to own and control ideas indefinitely; not works, not art, not inventions, not mechanical devices,; not a tangible device, but the intangible, non-object of the idea; an electrical patterin in your brain. They want to control thinking, and with that actions, because it is profitable. Billions are spent per year in just researching advertising; finding the new way to force people to understand your ideas and in some ways manipulating them.
The sharing of ideas is necissary for evolution to continue.
Companies act with no moral or ethical motive, nor any regard for human life; their members act in only their own self interest and the company becomes a personification of individuals who do not know what each other are doing, all guilty of the same crimes. When companies are taken over by CEO's who encourage their employee's to lay limp and never fight, the company also destroys itself, slowly. Wal-mart is an example of this.
As this goes on, people become more detached from feeling; they become numb to the world around them and fall victim to the worst sort of death; a life never lived.
There's a crowd of people who will never purchase anything they do not fully control; doing otherwise is inviting someone to control you.
... can now have it restored, apparently with annotations intact.
Wait a second-- where are these annotations coming from? When they erased the text of the books from Kindles, they didn't erase the annotations, but apparently archived them somewhere?
Does this imply that Amazon can remotely access (and read?) any private notes anybody makes using their Kindle?
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
Just how often do these Kindles phone home, anyway? And just EXACTLY what information do they send?
1. Whatever goes upon two legs is an enemy
2. Whatever goes upon four legs, or has wings, is a friend.
3. No animal shall wear clothes.
4. No animal shall sleep in a bed.
5. No animal shall drink alcohol.
6. No animal shall kill any other animal.
7. All animals are equal.
The fact that the, (originally 1945 published), E-Book was pulled from the Kindel is enough to satisfy my ever wanting to purchase such a device. If I have a paper copy of "Animal Farm" printed by some other publisher than that which the current "copy right holder" has approved, who gives a shit? The book is 50 plus years old for fucks sake! Is there anyone, other than a corporate shithead able to profit from this?
Corporations: All the privileges of the individual without any ethical, legal or moral considerations of same.
It doesn't remove their ability to delete the books you bought and paid for if they deem it necessary. This is different from buying a physical book in that generally to take the work away from you they have to come to where you're keeping it, preferably with guns.
It doesn't remove the inherent unreliability of a system that can take away the content you've bought at any time. To resolve that you need a solution that doesn't involve DRM.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Break into my device and delete a product that /I PAID FOR/, and then, months later, offer me a fucking coupon?
Fuck you.
It was coming to bite them in the a**... with a student suing them and everything.
They finally realized they were getting widespread negative publicity, poorer reviews, more people recommending to stay away frmo kindle and get something else, and maybe, just maybe, it put a small dent in their sales.
Enough for them to stand up and take notice...
If it were just a few customers effected by the deletion and hasn't been widely publicized in the news, I have my doubts that Amazon would have ever done something to right the situation.
Doesn't this mean that Amazon has backed up every single Kindle? Presumably if you tried hard enough after losing your Kindle you could get all your books back...
Laughter is the best medicine, except if you have a broken rib.
See, the terms of use already specify that you own everything you buy from amazon forever. That they won't take it away from you.
By deleting the Orwell books amazon already broke their own rules. Even if they said "We pledge [in some legally binding fashion] that this capability will never be reactivated." as you suggest I would not trust them.
If so, then what they are doing is definitely the right thing... good for them.
If not, however... then all this amounts to is a company deciding to willfully break the law to satisfy the customers that it pissed off.
But in fact, when Amazon removed those materials from people's Kindles, they did the only thing they _could_ do, at least within the framework of law, which was to refund and retract the reading privileges to those people that it had mistakenly sold them to in the first place. I don't think even Amazon would dispute that they are entirely at fault over this whole mess, but with push coming to shove on the issue, them refunding the money and pulling the infringing material off of the kindles when they discovered their error was almost certainly the only legally viable course of action they had. It's hardly likely they did this with the intention of annoying people, even though they certainly were aware that was going to be the most probably outcome. But y'know... if they had never had such an ability to do so in the first place, then they could not have been so legally obligated to have taken that action (but they'd have certainly been on the hook for a lot more to the rights holders, and somebody at Amazon would have probably lost their job over it, if someone hasn't already)... which I suppose just goes to show that DRM can sometimes bite the seller just as badly as the consumer.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Who got fired?
Have you fscked your local propeller head today?
I seriously considered buying a kindle from amazon. Sure, the technical possibility of remotely deleting my books irritated me in the beginning but I thought "Aw, amazon is such a nice company. Their customer service is excellent, they don't censor negative reviews... Surely I can trust them to never do that. And look, they explicitly said in the Terms of Service that they will never do that. So let's just quit being so paranoid and trust a company, just this time".
Then they started to delete Orwell books and for me, a world broke down. Do you know this feeling, when you figure out, that a good friend of you has been lying to you? Well, that's how this digital book burning felt to me. It completely destroyed my trust in that company. And since amazon was my most trusted company, I now no longer trust any other company with ultimate online access to my devices.
So, instead of buying a kindle I bought a simple chinese ereader without web access. Sure, it's not as pretty as a kindle, it has no wikipedia access and the poor translation of the manual starts with "For safely and efficiently use the product, please strictly abide by the rules, otherwise the danger will happen" but at least I know that nobody can take my ebooks away from me.
It doesn't matter how much they protest; it doesn't make the whole episode any less ironic. The more they promise they won't do it that way again unless they feel they have a legal right to, the more they point out the fact that they can delete your books (and modify them? and inspect notes? reading patterns? what else?) any time they really want to.
The upshot is: they've demonstrated the presence of the memory hole and their ability and willingness to use it. They're sorry they got caught, and they'd like you to forget all about it and by yourself a Kindle.
I would have suggested $19.84
"Kittens give Morbo gas!"
Completely ridiculous.
Dear customer,
We apologize for acting like Big Brother. Here's your copy of "1984" back.
Sincerely,
Amazon
Table-ized A.I.
any (legal) copyright protection removed for any material that has DRM. You, author, want to break the deal with customers and with general public by not giving them all the rights they have (via technological means). FINE. There's no deal then. No (legal) copyright protection
Yes.
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
So when are they changing the firmware so that deletes always require a user-interface confirmation?
It's the right fix. It still allows refunds, the user just has to manually acquiesce to the deletion on the kindle itself.
It's not like this changes amazon's ability to be sure the delete happened.
The firmware would be just as secure or insecure with the change.
-josh
I'm not sure the same is true if you purchase goods which infringe copyright.
In this case, I'm not sure how copyright comes into it, since the books concerned are clearly derivative works. The original text of both books is now well and truly available in the public domain, and in fact are available in clear text at Project Gutenberg here and here.
All you would be paying for is someone else's annotations.
You would have to be a moron to buy an ebook from Amazon.
They pledge to never do bad again. Oh, but they are going to keep all the same capabilities they have always had to delete books.
This is a quote from the Licence Agreement & Terms of service
Use of Digital Content.
Upon your payment of the applicable fees set by Amazon, Amazon grants you the non-exclusive right to keep a permanent copy of the applicable Digital Content and to view, use, and display such Digital Content an unlimited number of times, solely on the Device or as authorized by Amazon as part of the Service and solely for your personal, non-commercial use. Digital Content will be deemed licensed to you by Amazon under this Agreement unless otherwise expressly provided by Amazon.
I'm not a lawyer, I don't live in the USA and I'm not even that good at understanding english, but to me this sounds like "If you bought it you can keep it".
Keep in mind the chain of events:
1. Someone scans Orwell books and wants to sell them on amazon
2. Amazon says "Sure, why not?"
3. People buy these copies from amazon and annotate them
4. Amazon notices that the copies aren't legal and delete them from every device, rendering the annotations useless.
If you interpret the license agreement to mean "You can keep it only if it turns out to be a legal copy" than this agreement is pretty much useless, since you don't want to check the copyright and licence on everything you want to buy from amazon.
BB is watching you and can burn you books if he wants :)
Amazon still has the capability of remotely and silently modifying your Kindle. There's no technological reason they couldn't do this again. These devices need to be built with protections that make this sort of thing impossible.
Even scarier, Amazon could theoretically modify your books if they wanted to. If they don't want you reading chapter 28, they can remove it and renumber the rest.
In the new copies there's no such word as freedom.
But in good news chocolate rations are going up.
The damage is already done. Innumerable people (including those that don't even own a Kindle) are now aware of the full extend of what they give up when they buy products encumbered with DRM. We'll add it to the long list of similar demonstrations, although this one is pretty special given that it involves Orwell's '1984'. I mean, poor John Smith is going to be out of a job if text can be remotely redacted and restored as easily as Amazon's system. How do we know it's the same version of '1984'? :-)
People were pissed off with Amazon for removing the material that they felt they had bought from Amazon and for them, that should have spelled the end of the deal.
Except they are forgetting one small thing... a sale is a verbal contract between the seller and buyer to agree that the price of some goods is worth whatever the amount is that is being paid. However, it is well known that portions of a contract that are not legal are not binding. Since Amazon never had any rights to sell the product in the first place, the buyers similarly never had any rights to be accessing that particular content. In fact, this is almost the exact same thing as if one had purchased, without any intent of wrongdoing whatsoever, stolen merchandise from an otherwise legitimate vendor, and the police had managed to trace it and suddenly taken it away. A customer might have a right to feel some indignation over the circumstance, but unless one is advocating a society where it is only preferable to be law abiding when it is convenient for the individual (which is, if one thinks about it for a moment, actually just a more subtle form of anarchy), they ought not to be angry with the police for taking the material from them.
"Ah," one might counter to this point, "but it wasn't the police who took the information off of the Kindle, it was Amazon themselves." This is true, but considering that they had the ability to do this the whole time, it's not at all inconceivable (and quite probable in fact) that they could have been under legal obligation to have done so. It's not at all improbable that when Amazon was requested to do this if they had decided to not comply, they could have found themselves in all kinds of legal hot water that would make the P.R. mess this caused look like a picnic... oh, and the material would likely get removed from consumer's devices anyways... so as far as the end user is concerned, they'd have still lost their content... at least this way, Amazon was in a position to readily refund the purchase price for the ebook to purchasers of it, a position they might have still been able to do, but not have been as ready and able to do so immediately if they had not complied with the request because more of their resources would certainly have been tied up in extensive legal proceedings. Now granted, I don't know any of the above for certain, but I don't consider it to be particularly unlikely.
And not that I have any particular reason to feel I need to apologize for Amazon, I'm just offering the above opinion as a possibly alternative way of looking at the situation.
Now, that said... I have to say that I'm actually quite glad that this whole mess occurred... not only because it serves quite well as precedent that can _clearly_ indicate to consumers about why spending money on DRM content is unwise (I think perhaps that the sony rootkit fiasco had a bigger impact), but also because it also can show companies that them trying to utilize DRM to protect content puts them in a position of having more responsibility to take corrective action if they ever happen to do something wrong, however inadvertent it may be, and that such corrective action may end up creating a public-reations nightmare that would only be wished upon a company that one only wants to see fold.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
> In essence, they shipped out stolen property.
1) It wasn't stolen property
1.1) If a shopping mall finds out that a shop (in the mall) is selling stolen property even if it has the physical ability (mall guards etc) to go to buyer's houses, take the stuff and return it to the original owners, it does not have the legal right to do it. The mall should report it to the relevant authorities so that appropriate action can be taken. The mall could tell the shop they cannot operate in the mall, and they might be sued by the mall too for breach of contract (doing illegal stuff) etc.
2) If a shopping mall finds out that a shop is illegally copying software/music for customers, even if it has the technical ability to delete the material from the buyer's computers it does not have the legal right to do it.
Who does the Kindle belong to? Amazon or the user? If it's the user's then what Amazon might be illegal in many countries - it would breach computer misuse acts or antihacking laws.
And even if it belongs to Amazon and is just rented to the user, the Courts might not agree that Amazon has complete and utter control over the kindle. There are limits to what landlords can do to their tenants and the rented property. Same goes for rented cars. Or even repossessing cars.
If people are fine with Corporations doing what Amazon did, then they are frogs being slowly boiled. Eventually the Corporations may extend their powers to more domains and the precious constitutions and laws of various countries would effectively be irrelevant. They may not succeed at first but they will keep on trying (after all the end result is very profitable for them).
What good is a constitutional right to freedom of speech if EVERY place (even the house you rent) is owned by a Corporation that only allows you to stay if you don't say or do certain things, and everyone believes that since the Corporations own it the Corporations can do whatever they want to it.
An important legal principle is that you can't sell something that isn't yours to sell. For example, if I steal a car, "sell" it to a used car dealer, who "sells" it to you, the original owner will be able to recover the car from you, because it remains his car.
Now, imagine you go to a used car dealer, and he sells you a car, and takes your money. As you get ready to drive the car off the lot, he comes up, tells you that they have just found out the car is stolen, hands you your money back, and says "sorry". No one would have a problem with that.
On the other hand, if you drove the car home, used it for a month, maybe customized it, and then the car dealer found it was stolen, so mailed you a check, and sent a repo man out to take the car, that would be a problem. The dealer should have just told the police who they sold the car to, and let the police deal with recovering it.
But what if the customer takes the car home, and then brings it back six months later for an oil change, and the dealer then, while the car is in the shop, finds out it was stolen, and refunds the purchase money then and returns the car to the real owner? OK or not?
Amazon was in a novel situation. They had "sold" an ebook that they could not sell, so the "buyer" had not actually successfully bought the item. Unlike with cars, there is no clear change of possession--you do not drive an ebook off the lot. You get a copy for your device, but your device remains in contact with Amazon (kind of like a car in the shop for an oil change).
I wanted this to go into court, where it could be established that Amazon had no legal right to do what it did.
Alternatively, a criminal investigation against Amazon employees to find out who was responsible for massive computer crime.
Anything to establish, firmly, that breaking into somebody else's system and deleting information is illegal. I don't want an assurance from some company that they won't do something again. I want something legally binding.
And, yes, I know that this will happen when some Sony execs are doing hard time for the rootkit crime, and I'm hacking Perl 6 scripts to help play Duke Nukem Forever on a Hurd-based OS.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
The original, rather anti government or the new 'government friendly' version that was edited while the book was out of users hands?
---- Booth was a patriot ----
pu tnerap doM
Fair.
I was always hesitant of using the unit in the first place. Then they did what they did to their users afterward.
I'm glad that their is some resolution to the whole problem.
This is the single reason why i don't think that College books are not going to those units anytime soon.
Imagine carrying all those books around campus again.
I'm here for the experience, not the Hyperbole.
I have looked at all current arguments in this debate and we all know they were wrong but i can say that i won't be getting a kindle anytime soon.
I am personally disapointed! :-)
I remember the Old PALM OS, The color units and they had the ability to hold copies of books albiet open source (Sherlock holmes, etc..) and i did not have someone snatch my class notes away from me? Get a grip! College costs too much for us to get screwed over again.
I'm here for the experience, not the Hyperbole.
1) Don't buy a closed-source system filled with DRM next time.
Tada! Problem solved. Profit is optional.