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.

Comments

Annotations??

[Geoffrey.landis]

... 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?

Re:damage

[digitalunity]

How else would you explain the 2 month time period that elapsed before a decision was made?

Both very large companies I have worked for in the past corrected decisions that affected the customer in hours, not months. When you do something hilariously stupid, you fix it immediately and ponder the ramifications later. That's just good business.

The real reason they probably did it

[mysidia]

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.

Re:damage

[petermgreen]

My understanding is that the annotations are stored seperately and could indeed be accessed after the book dissapeared. The trouble is without the context provided by the exact version of the book they are meant to go with the annotations lose a lot of thier meaning.

So if amazon has restored the exact version of the book they killed then I don't see the annotations regaining thier context as too serious.

Re:Nice gesture, but that's not what worries me

[itsme1234]

If you buy a stolen stereo on the street, it can be confiscated by the government. Same for a stolen car, that's why we have chop shops that launder parts from stolen cars back out into the market. So, granted IP rights may be different than real world stuff (did anybody suffer harm because unauthorized copies were distributed? was anybody deprived of anything? don't quote anything in parentheses, or this sentence, this isn't what i'm here to discuss), if you are in possession of a stolen item, it can be confiscated. It looks like amazon was just trying to jump the gun and possibly assumed that the copies would equate to 'stolen'.

Other side of the coin, let's say that these were just counterfeit copies. I.E. unauthorized copies of a protected item. I feel that this is closer to the truth. Current law says that it is NOT within the government's rights to seize a single counterfeit item if that is the only copy in your possession and you do not intend to sell it. That's why you never hear about a non-seller's collection of bootleg dvd's or fake-gucci purses being siezed. So had amazon realized that, it would have classified the re-seller as a digital counterfeiter and possibly resolved the matter by shutting off transfer rights (to another account, not another device within the account.)

I think the first problem is that while the government can (legally) do many things (from taking your goods to killing people) Amazon can't . After they sold you the stolen or fake or infringing or whatever goods they can't (legally) just reach to your computer/kindle and "correct" the mistake by helping themselves just because this is the way they designed the system.

Plus I'm sick and tired of this DRM double dipping. Copyright gives rights not only to authors but also to customers AND all other people. With DRM authors are giving themselves technologically rights they don't have legally. Copyright owners don't have the legal right to stop you from selling your music collection. They don't have the right to take back what they sold to you. They don't have the right to prevent you from playing your US DVD in Europe. They don't have the right to forbid you to take small parts to use them in a research work (fair use). They don't have the right to kill your collection because they don't think maintaining the authentication servers is profitable for them (yes, Yahoo, Microsoft, Wallmart I'm looking at you). And above all they don't have the right to keep their creations from falling into public domain (although they are very close to their desired "forever less one day" in extending the copyright terms).

Not that there's any chance in hell for this to happen but I vote to have 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 for whatever DRMed crap you sell.