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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.
...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.
... 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?
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.
It's copyright, not "copy right" or are you attempting to differentiate between legal rights and ill-gotten gains?
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.
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!"
>the terms of use already specify that you own everything you buy from amazon forever.
Does it infact ever say that in so many words?
Or does it say in effect you own every *legally* purchased item?
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
Completely ridiculous.
The cumulative actions sustain a great evil drain on the US economy, decimating local economies in small towns across the country.
And they do this... how? You mean by providing competition that local businesses can't compete with? Well, I have one thing to say to that: tough shit. That's capitalism in action. What would you rather they do? Deliberately inflate prices to protect those precious little mom-and-pops?
For all the good the free market has done, WalMart is the yardstick for measuring where capitalism goes horribly wrong.
Please, tell me: why?
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.
Just a few reasons, I'll try to be brief.
Walmart, for many years has refused to offer any type of parking lot security due to costs. Numerous employees have been raped, assaulted and robbed in their own parking lots because Walmart refuses to address the issue.
Walmart flaunts many state and local environmental laws about lawn and garden goods being stored outdoors, such as storing pallets of fertilizers outdoors in stream and river watershed areas. Fertilizers have detrimental effects on fish reproductive cycles.
Walmart exercises gender discrimination for promotions with surgical precision. They have been sued numerous times over the years for policies that make it difficult for women to come up in the ranks.
The average Walmart employee works just 28-32 hours per week, with a total monthly income of about $1100. Over 50% of Walmart's employees lack health insurance. Even those that have it pay through the nose because Walmart's contribution is so low. Monthly premiums are often as high as $200+. A disproportionate number of Walmart employees receive Medicaid benefits compared to the general population. In effect, Walmart shifts the medical care cost burden of it's employees onto taxpayers more than any other country in the US.
Walmart has settled charges in numerous states for hiring illegal immigrants. Immigrants lower the value of jobs because they often are willing to work for less than a citizen, leaving more citizens unemployed or underemployed than would be otherwise. Those unemployed or underemployed citizens are often on multiple public assistance programs, amplifying the cost to taxpayers.
Walmart directly operates slave labor factories in China, India and Indonesia through subsidiaries. The employees often live in huge scale dormitory like buildings where they eat, sleep, work and live. The conditions are often poor and the income is very low, even by their own local standards. These factories have little regard for the employees with no concept of OSHA, ergonomics, reasonable breaks, health care, anti-discrimination laws, etc.
Walmart is the single largest foreign products importer in the United States. While no exact figure is known, it's common knowledge that a high percentage of Walmart's revenue is shipped overseas. With such a high percentage of their products coming from Indonesia, India, China, Taiwan and South Korea, each dollar you spend at a Walmart is that much less effective at boosting your own local economy. Numerous local and regional businesses have gone under because Walmart sells for less and consumers are often blind to the damage Walmart does to their region.
To sum it up, Walmart is effectively the devil of all corporations.
You can't legislate goodness. Let each to his own destiny, by will of his freely made choices.
I've no clue which publisher changed their minds but... given that they're the publisher of 1984, perhaps they subscribe to the ideas within? Perhaps this was a neat demonstration that we live in a 1984-type world already, with Amazon as the tool ?
Wild and crazy theory but that would make this whole situation somehow perfect :D
Requiem for the American Dream
It was legally purchased. Only after the sale did the publisher recant. This decision doesn't somehow ripple back in time making the sale illegal.
Requiem for the American Dream
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
And moreover, they can say it all they want, but if there's DRM involved, it's a lie.
-josh
I'm not defending Amazon's actions here, merely questioning SlothDead's characterization of the terms of sale.
Amazon did not have the right to sell it, because the their supplier did not have the right to sell to them.
It is somewhat akin to stolen property at this point, and can not be legally bought any more than stolen jewelry or cars.
But unlike cars, all Amazon had to do was pay the rightful copyright owner a royalty out of their pocket, and chock it up to damaged goods, and write it off on their taxes.
Taking it out on the customers was the wrong thing to do.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
I originally went with a point-by-point attempt at at rebuttal, but I'm not sure there's much point, so I'll just go with my conclusion:
To sum it up, Walmart is effectively the devil of all corporation
Pure, unadulterated BS. To sum it up, Walmart is a perfectly average corporation. I'm sorry, you didn't cite a single point that is uniquely evil or uniquely Walmart. Sexism? Hiring illegal immigrants? Outsourcing labour? Jebus, you could be describing half the corporations in the US.
Meanwhile, Walmart a) hires millions of people, providing jobs that might otherwise be completely unavailable, and b) has been a driving force in keeping inflation down, allowing the poor to achieve a standard of living they would otherwise be unable to afford.
Look, I'm no fan of US corporations in general. And the statement "Walmart is a perfectly average corporation" is no complement. But your comments are hyperbolic at best. The simple fact is that Walmart is, just like every other US corporation, a profit driven entity that works to enrich it's shareholders. But it's hardly "evil", let alone the pinnacle of it.
This is the key for me; rapid exchange of ideas is leading to a global increase in consciousness; this makes us more difficult to subdue/control - therefore, an all-out attack on sharing under one guise or another.
Requiem for the American Dream
As I understand it, the sequence of events went like this:
* publisher decides to sell books through amazon
* people buy books
* publisher changes mind
* amazon takes books back
What I'm saying is that your characterization is effectively identical to slothdead's .. they had the legal right at one point, people bought it legally and so there should be no way to pretend they did otherwise.
You seem to be saying that amazon didn't ever have the right to sell.
Requiem for the American Dream
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.
But that account is wrong:
http://www.melonfarmers.co.uk/storymf00554.htm
"Contrary to what the New York Times reported, the publisher did not change its mind, nor did Amazon cave to pressure. Rather, Amazon was notified that copyrighted material was being sold on the Amazon store without permission and it removed said material."
So we are back to the stolen goods scenario. Someone sold Amazon ebooks that they did not hold the rights to. Amazon was itself a victim.
Amazon can't legally resell stolen goods.
Having done so, they certainly don't gain the right to steal them back from kindle owners. They should have just paid the royalty to the rightful copyright holder and be done with it.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
No, it's not an AVERAGE corporation. WalMart is a $400 billion per year company with over 2 million employees, making them the largest company in the world. If you took all their employees and put them on an island and called it a country, they would be the 143rd largest country on earth.
Are you getting the picture yet?
Their size alone doesn't make them evil, but you have to take their size and resources into account when you look at the effect they have on the US economy. If over 50% of their 2 million employees have no health insurance and average an income of just $1100 per month, that puts almost their entire work force near poverty levels relying on all us other wealthier taxpayers to foot the bill for their medical expenses.
Now you might be tempted to say "well those people chose to accept that job". That is kind of a callous position considering many have little choice because WalMart put local competitors out of business through their cutthroat pricing and megachain distribution agreements.
I know you're apathetic to the situation because well hell, this is just the way capitalism works right? It doesn't need to be this way. People with the financial stability to make responsible choices such as myself need to simply make a stand and say "No more. I wont support companies that increase the burden on social service programs."
I don't shop at WalMart, ever. I won't support a company that treats its employees like that.
You can't legislate goodness. Let each to his own destiny, by will of his freely made choices.
BB is watching you and can burn you books if he wants :)
You're close. The correct action would have been for the copyright holder to sue the seller. Amazon just provided a venue for the sale, on good faith that the seller was allowed to sell the good. They probably have language in the marketplace agreement to state that the seller must indemnify Amazon against all such damages, so they would have almost certainly been on solid legal ground to simply stop selling the book and then allow the publisher to pursue the seller in court.
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.
This may be true, but you can hardly hold capitalism responsible for that. WalMart doesn't get a single extra cent from preventing women's promotion. If it affects WalMart's profits at all, it does so negatively, because it reduces the chances that the best people (i.e. those who are most able to make decisions which increase WalMart's profits) get promoted.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
In the new copies there's no such word as freedom.
But in good news chocolate rations are going up.
Particularly as this relates to 'imaginary property', I see no reason why the buyers, who bought in good faith, should be deprived of their purchases.
If we accept that the rights holder didn't ever give permission to the sales, their wishes have been ignored when offering the items for sale but should their rights be given more weight than those of the customers? I see no reason why this should be so.
Requiem for the American Dream
Amazon can't legally resell stolen goods.
Except there were no "stolen goods". When are people going to understand that theft and copyright infringement are not the same thing, have never been the same thing, and never WILL be the same thing?
Amazon had already completed the sale and copied the content to the customers' Kindles, so the infringement already had occurred, and nothing could undo that. Amazon also had completed sales with their customers, who bargained in good faith. IMO, Amazon's *only* legitimate option would have been to leave the content on the Kindle's as-is, and negotiate a settlement with the rights holder(s). I suspect the intervening time was mostly filled by the legal types considering the very public class-action suit they were likely to lose as a result of their actions, and the financial types determining that reinstating the purchases and settling with the rights holders was by far the cheaper option.
Amazon wasn't a victim - they simply failed to do any kind of due diligence, and assumed that just because it was legal for the supplier to sell in their own country, that it was also legal for them to sell in the U.S.
Please stand clear of the doors, por favor mantenganse alejado de las puertas
If over 50% of their 2 million employees have no health insurance and average an income of just $1100 per month, that puts almost their entire work force near poverty levels relying on all us other wealthier taxpayers to foot the bill for their medical expenses.
Uhuh. And if there was no Walmart? They might *not having a job at all*. Furthermore, for all those people who *don't* work at Walmart while living on a low income, Walmart has made it possible for them to fund a lifestyle they couldn't otherwise affort, which is a *good* thing. But, of course, you're too blinded in your irrational hatred to consider that Walmart *might* just have some positive effects on the economy.
That is kind of a callous position considering many have little choice because WalMart put local competitors out of business through their cutthroat pricing and megachain distribution agreements.
Uhuh. And those local competitors? a) You have absolutely no evidence proving they would've paid more or provided a better health plan... and in the current economy, the precise opposite would've likely been true, with local businesses firing people or putting them part-time, and cutting or reducing health benefits b) Wouldn't hire as many people as Walmart does, c) Charged higher prices, thus making it more difficult for those poor people you're so worried about to actually support their standard of living.
Thus, in the end, for a local person living near the poverty line, at worst, Walmart is basically a wash... the trade off is a possibly lower salary for definitely lower prices.
I know you're apathetic to the situation because well hell, this is just the way capitalism works right?
Apathetic? No, of course not. I happen to believe that Walmart, while not a perfect corporate citizen, is a net positive force for the economy. They hire millions and they act to stifle inflation by keeping prices down. For the poor that you seem so very deeply concerned with, that's a positive thing, not a negative one.
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
Or does it say in effect you own every *legally* purchased item?
It was a legally purchased item that was illegally created. It's not like stolen items. A stolen item is the property of the original owner. All future owners have no claim. But a copy was never the "property" of the copyright holder, and as such, no law, judgement, or even suggestion that they be "returned" has ever happened. Amazon broke the law in copying what they didn't have the rights for. The only way to bring legal action against the final buyer is for the copyright holder to take action against them. There was no law broken in the sale. There was when Amazon made the copy, but the sale is, was, and will always be a legally binding contract between Amazon and the buyer, and Amazon broke that contract. As far as I can tell, Amazon was the only party in this that broke the law, then broke a contract in order to address the initial violation (though not in a way that actually reduced their legal liability). The user bought an item in good faith that was sold by the owner. That the owner committed illegal acts in making it available doesn't mean the sale was illegal. Again, this isn't theft, the copyright holder has no legal claim on the item once made, just avenues of compensation and punishement and, at most, destruction after proper legal action. That Amazon guessed what the legal decision would be and acted early makes them a vigilante that broke the law to impose their own, not a hero of copyright or a champion of consumer rights. And none of that makes the actual sale illegal. Amazon should have paid off the copyright holders in cash, or have been prosecuted for criminal copyright infringement for profit.
Learn to love Alaska
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 ----
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.
Yeah my bad, I wrote that post at 4 AM.
You can't legislate goodness. Let each to his own destiny, by will of his freely made choices.