Don't the first few billion years of earth's history provide strong evidence against that idea?
I wouldn't think so, necessarily. The key phrase I used was Earth-like. I wasn't trying to imply that just about any rocky planet we found was bound to have intelligent life on it (although I think a lot of them will probably have some life on them, even if it's just algae-like), but I think if it's got rocks, an atmosphere (maybe oxygen-rich, but maybe not), and, of course, enough time to do it in, I don't see why it should evolve that much differently from our own. Maybe I'm thinking too intuitively, but I would think that if you have that kind of potential for life, you're going to get lots of lower forms first, just like we did, and that those forms are going to have to compete, and that intelligence would have its advantages. (Whether it is an advantage over size or speed in any given situation is a toss-up, I guess, but it should certainly give you some advantage, over being a dullard.)
I find it almost impossible to believe that, if there's another rocky, Earth-like planet out there, that it doesn't have intelligent life on it. Whether we'd actually recognize intelligent life when/if we saw it is quite another question. If we found the extraterrestrial equivalent of dolphins, I'm guessing it might take us a while to discover their true intellect.
Many species can choose whether to reproduce sexually or asexually; they almost always choose sex when available because it gives so many advantages to their offspring.
This isn't intended as a jab, but is the word "choose" really appropriate here? "Choice" implies volition, whereas it was my understanding that environmental factors determined whether a species that could do either reproduced sexually or asexually.
It's fairly clear that we're the cause of an extreme extinction event (see Holocene Extinction event), and while it might not be the worst (which goes to the Permian-Triassic event), it is certainly dramatic and might win in terms of rate (number of species disappearing per year).
Granted, it's just Wikipedia, but the article you cite above demonstrates, better than anything else, that scientists currently have not the foggiest notion of the impact we're having on the planet's biosphere. Early in the article, we read this:
Between 1500 and 2006 CE, 784 extinctions have been documented by the International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources.[1] However, since most extinctions go undocumented, scientists estimate that during the 20th century, between 20,000 and two million species actually became extinct, but the precise total cannot be determined more accurately within the limits of present knowledge. Up to 140,000 species per year (based on Species-area theory)[2] may be the present rate of extinction based upon upper bound estimating.
If this wasn't such a serious topic, the passage above would make me laugh my proverbial ass off. Not only have the "scientists" referenced abandoned the idea of documentation (a.k.a., "data"), but they've settled on a range of species extinctions with a 10,000% margin of error. If that's the best they can do with the data, you can't fault them for telling the truth, but it's hardly anything to hang your hat on, in terms of a theory.
Wikipedia has a broader article on major extinction events, and the Holocene event doesn't even rate as "major". (It's listed in the "minor" event list.) The accompanying graph seems to bear that out (at least for marine life).
So, yes, humans are an abnormal influence on the planet, and in this context (introducing exospecies into a fragile environment), it's certainly relevant to separate the human influence from the norm (say, the previous hundred million years of evolution).
You're clearly missing the point. The question isn't whether human beings caused more extinctions than any other single species (or any other event, for that matter). Even if you blindly assume that that's true, that has nothing to do with whether or not human activity is "natural" or not. Human behavior has evolved the same way the species of any other species has evolved. We have needs for resources just like any other species does. Human activity, then, is no more "unnatural" than any other species' activity (the aforementioned ants or beavers, for example).
As for extremophiles, yeah, we probably can't kill all life on the planet. That's why I said "has a fair chance".
There's not a "fair" chance. Barring some planet-exploding technology (i.e., the planet goes "BOOM!!" in a Death Star-like explosion), it's not going to happen. There are plenty of things that do have a "fair chance" of destroying all life on Earth (e.g., a Moon-sized body crashing into Earth), and there are a lot of scenarios that would lead to no one posting on Slashdot for the next few billion years, but generally, the idea that we could destroy all life on Earth (or come remotely close to it) is nonsense. Sane environmentalism is focused on keeping it a habitable place for humans, and not breaking out the rosary beads every time another species of rat goes extinct. (Sorry. That last reference was my Catholic high school days coming back. *shudder*)
Irrespective of whether they had the right to ship the book in the first place, it was wrong to delete the book from what is essentially not their property.
If you're saying that it was morally wrong, that's a debatable point. The terms of the Kindle agreement, which users agree to, clearly allow them to do it.
Nobody is saying they should have redistributed the copies illegally.
The proper course of action would have been to never have a remote kill-switch in the first place. The fact that Amazon remotely deleted everyones copies of the copyrighted work did not remove their civil liability for copyright infringement. It might have made the copyright owner more palpable but had they chosen to sue Amazon, Bezos would have found himself none the safer.
Copyright violations are civil in nature (unless you're talking about something covered under the DMCA), so in order for a violation to be pursued, it would have to be taken to court. I suspect that what Amazon did was create an agreement with the copyright holder so that they wouldn't take Amazon to court on this. (Otherwise, I don't think they would've been able to offer the users the book to download again.) So while you're technically correct that the deletion of the books in itself didn't give Amazon any legal protection, in all likelihood they have a legally binding contract with the copyright holder that the holder won't pursue the copyright issue.
From a simple customer fairness perspective, Amazon's customers purchased the book in good faith. Amazon should have no more right, let alone capability to forcibly take the book away than a brick and mortar store has to force you to return a physical book. If you buy a physical book from Barnes & Noble and it turns out that the printer didn't have copyrights to produce it, B&N doesn't call you demanding you return the book-they resolve the issue between the copyright holder and publisher behind the scenes.
Amazon should be no different.
This is the crux of the problem: The situation Amazon found itself in wouldn't happen at a brick and mortar store. What happened in this instance would be the equivalent of someone dropping off a truckload of books at Barnes & Noble's headquarters, saying, "Hey, here're some books. Sell these for me, okay?", and getting paid for the books, and then Amazon turning around and selling them to the next people that walked in the (physical) door. That's generally not how a major chain bookstore does business, so it wouldn't have happened.
This was a problem with Amazon's distribution strategy from the beginning.
> In essence, they shipped out stolen property.
1) It wasn't stolen property.
...which is why I began the sentence with the words "In essence". The intellectual property wasn't "stolen" in the conventional sense, but the right to copy was. That's the whole point of copyright: You're not legally allowed to distribute copyrighted material if you don't own the copyright or haven't come to an agreement with the copyright holder (albeit with fair use exceptions, which weren't in play here).
In this instance, one could think of Amazon.com as something of a pawn shop. A pawn shop is not legally allowed to sell stolen goods, and if they do sell stolen goods, they reveal who they stole the goods to, and they're taken back from the buyer by the authorities. The difference here is that Amazon did the retrieving, but that's covered in the EULA and TOS.
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.
That's an interesting idea. I think it has to be stressed that Amazon's users agreed to let Amazon into the Kindle, though. Just like iPod/iPhone users agree to let Apple into their computers, and Windows users agree to let Microsoft into theirs. The biggest difference here is that Amazon actually removed software that a user paid for, but it's conceivable that you'd be in the same boat if you bought a piece of software on the Web with a virus in it, for example. Is a piece of antivirus software removing an infected application exactly the same situation? No, because in that case, the antivirus software isn't doing it for legal reasons. But it's still a piece of software removing something you paid for from your system, so it's not exactly an unheard of situation.
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.
The relevant agreements between Amazon and the Kindle user seem pretty clear that a) users own the Kindle, and b) users are granted a license to the content. That's not exactly the same as renting, as the license doesn't expire, but it's not the same as full rights, either.
But that's not really the issue. Book readers don't have full permission to do whatever they want with paper books, either. Sure, you can lend to a friend, and you can resell, but you can't make a copy of the book. That's what's at issue here, because when Amazon sells an e-book, they're not losing the copy they have. They're simply allowing the user to make a copy.
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).
The slippery slope is a logical fallacy. The ability to get one law passed does not imply the ability to get increasingly more stringent laws passed.
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.
1) The constitutional right to freedom of speech is not absolute -- and doesn't really apply here in the first place.
2) If the corporation owns it, they do have the right to tell you what you can do on thei
I think we can reasonably take "natural" as shorthand for "not influenced by humans".
How can that be reasonable when it is an absolutely false dichotomy?
People make the same error when it comes to "natural herbal supplements" vs. "drugs". (Chemicals are chemicals, no matter how they're created. If a compound has an effect on the human body, it can be toxic. Google "water intoxication". Anything "completely safe" is worthless, medically.) The actions of humans are no less "natural" than ants building a colony or beavers building a dam. We just happen to have the intelligence and opposable thumbs to manufacture more sophisticated materials.
We might have some competition for most disruptive force to ever appear on this planet (e.g. the first oxygen-exhaling organisms), but we're definitely the worst to appear in eons, and we're unique in that we're the first thing to appear that has a fair chance of killing off all life on the planet.
"Killing all life on the planet" ain't as easy as it looks. Even if we did our absolute worst and nuked each other all to Hell, while simultaneously letting global warming run amok, there would still be room, at the very least, for extremophiles.
Note: I'm not saying that's a good idea. I'm simply saying that one facet of human arrogance is the idea that we have the power to kill all life on the planet. We don't. You'd be almost as accurate if you said we had the power to destroy all life in the universe.
Basically what I'm saying is: come on, be reasonable. Of course humans are an abnormal influence on the planet.
The PC I'm typing this on has never gotten a virus. It's really not THAT hard if you pay even a little bit of attention.
You are a geek. You know something about computers. Most people don't. Just because -you- can keep your Windows install virus free doesn't mean that Joe Sixpack is going to be able to.
Here's the problem with that analysis: Avoiding viruses isn't a matter of technical knowledge. Most PCs come with some anti-virus software on them when you buy them. The minimum effort involved is keeping a subscription current. The maximum effort involved is browsing to a Web page, clicking an icon, and double-clicking it to install it. What about that is a "geek" skill? Millions of people browse the Internet every day. They wouldn't be able to get viruses, otherwise.
No, you get random kernel panics. About as often as I get a "random" bluescreen. (Last time it happened was a poorly-seated daughterboard; switching to a newer case fixed that problem, and it's been rock solid ever since.)
Yeah, but Windows still bluescreens from problems that you won't have with a Mac due to all hardware having Apple's drivers (no graphics cards drivers to mess with, etc). Both are improving though.
Strictly speaking, it's not solely drivers that cause BSOD's. They're caused by the interaction of the drivers with software. If a piece of software tries to do something it's not supposed to do with a piece of hardware, the driver can cause a BSOD.
And just like a BSOD, the same thing can happen with a kernel panic. The fact that the same comapny makes the hardware and the OS has cross-application significance, but a bad piece of software can still bring the system down, even if the drivers and OS are stable..
There's something magical about the Apple HARDWARE that makes you more productive? Really? Last I saw, it was still a monitor, mouse, and keyboard -- everything else comes down to software & drive layout, and last I heard powermacs weren't used for render farms.
The multitouch trackpad is pretty useful. I didn't think that I would use it much, but it really does make it easier. Plus, things are generally speced to be fast, yes this means you won't find any $300 Macs new, but it also means that you won't get the experience you got with Vista (underspeced machines that should have been running XP running Vista and being terribly slow).
The multi-touch trackpad is cool. I'll give you that. I don't know how useful it is, because I don't know how much multi-touch is integrated into the UI. (I mean, I know you can zoom in on pictures, but can you, e.g., change font sizes in documents, highlight parts of columns in spreadsheets, etc.?) As for the notion of Macs being speced to be fast: There's really no trick to building a fast computer if you start off with a "Money is no object!" philosophy. Any yutz can do that with a couple days' research. The actual value comes in when you can find a system that hits the right price/performance balance (aka "bang for the buck"). The only passable argument I've ever heard in favor of Macs is that they last longer. That may be so, but computers have a built-in expiration date, because technology moves on. There comes a point when it's just cheaper to buy a new machine than to upgrade the one you have. Where that point is depends on what you want to do with the computer.
You can always tel when a fundamentalist freak enters the room -- simple failure of due diligence in verifying their distribution rights is immediately converted into the sin of "stealing".
I don't recall calling copyright violation a sin. It's an actionable offense, but not a "sin". (I think there are some pieces of legislation in Congress that elevate it to the level of a criminal act, but I do believe it's a civil matter, at this point.)
Spoken like a true patsy of the **AA and now of the publishing industry.
You might not realize this, but intellectual property rights are important. While we may disagree on how much the creators of content deserve to be paid (and that's what the marketplace is for), I think we all agree that they should at least get paid for their efforts. The problem here is that the right people were not getting paid. You can't legally buy something from someone who doesn't have the right to sell it to you. (The right to publish, in this case, is inextricably linked to the right to sell. These weren't second-hand books.)
Amazon should have withheld comment at all and engaged immediately in serious negotiations with the rightsholders. They would likely have been able to purchase rights for at least the mistakenly sold copies. At that point, they could have announced that they'd covered the buyers. If they were unable or unwilling to secure general rights, they could then have announced that the books were no longer available, but that they had preserved the rights to the copies already sold.
Unfortunately, there was more riding on this than simply the redistribution rights to books already sold. Part of the Kindle content distribution model relies on self-publishing through their DTP portal. After-the-fact negotiation concerning the royalties due was the easy part. Much more difficult was the task of trying to convince publishers and other copyright holders that they would act swiftly to stamp down on people trying to sell copyrighted works (where the copyrights were owned by someone else) in the Kindle store. That's what lead to Amazon's initial response. It wasn't solely about making that one individual copyright holder happy. It was about reassuring content producers that there was someone manning the gates.
I'm also doubtful that you can acquire rights a) after the fact, and b) for X number of copies. Authors generally hold the copyrights to their books. When Amazon sells a paper book, they're merely re-selling a book that was sold to them by the copyright holder. It's not the same situation as when Amazon stores a copy of an ebook on its servers, and allows people to buy it (thus duplicating the ebook in question, which, naturally, still resides on their servers after the purchase).
Withholding the information for that reason, and so as not to queer the deal with the rightsholders, would very likely have been accepted as prudent, good customer service.
See above. The problem with the strategy is that it doesn't address the distribution model Amazon has chosen, and doesn't assuage the fears of other publishers/authors that the same thing could happen to them.
As far as the killswitch goes, if they claim to remove it, I'd believe them as far as I believed Sony when they issued the "fix" to their rootkit. As for me, I wouldn't wipe my ass with Sony-branded toilet paper after that fiasco.
I doubt you'll ever hear of them removing the "killswitch", as you call it. Being able to remotely remove content from teh Kindle is one of the things they tout as a convenience, actually. It's used all the time, for example, when someone does a "return" of an e-book on Amazon. In that sense, the ability to remotely wipe books from the Kindle is a reassurance to some customers, that they won't be paying for a book that they don't like early on, or that they accidentally purchased by clicking the wrong button.
The problem here is, there's nothing you can "take back" (in terms of the actual copyright). You can't undo a copyright violation. It's like unbreaking an egg. Sure, you can limit the damage caused by the violation (e.g., seek damages, or get the books recalled, as Amazon did), but the actual book that's been copied isn't the violation itself. It's a result of someone violating your copyright.
In fact, the book itself might not be the property of the copyright holder at all. In the case at hand, Mobireference actually published the books. The copyright holder had nothing to do with that (which is why they had a problem with it). So the physical (or in this case, electronic) part of the book wasn't "stolen", per se. What was stolen was the right to reproduce it. Retrieving the book and refunding the customers was just a way to undo the damage (lost revenue and unauthorized use of intellectual property) that the violation itself caused.
I'm not trying to say that the purchase of the book didn't represent a copyright violation on its own. (IANAL, but I think it did.) What I'm saying is that this wasn't about "retrieving" property, so much as it was about making it as if it never was distributed in the first place. (In that regard, I'm kind of surprised Amazon had the foresight to keep the notes attached to the ebook.)
"It's hard to get a virus" isn't the same as "It's secure". The reason it's harder to get a virus on a Mac is because the Mac platform isn't as popular. If you're going to try and write a virus, you want it to spread as much as possible, which means Windows, not Mac. (Yes, it's generally easier to run with admin privileges in Windows, but viruses are a user problem, not an OS problem. Convince a user that there's something he/she needs that your program or Web page will provide, and there aren't enough warning dialog boxes in the world to stop them from running it. (And by God, they'll run it as root, if they have to.)
Because its not going to randomly bluescreen?
Calling it something different doesn't make it more horrible. As Planesdragon says, a kernel panic is no different from a BSOD.
Because its hardware lets you do more things faster?
Not dollar for dollar, it doesn't. Take a group of same-speced machines from the Windows and Mac worlds, and you'll see that the Macs are always more expensive for what you get. The exceptions, of course, are things you generally can't get on a PC, such as multitouch touchpads (last I heard, anyway), magnetically-fastend power cords, etc. Hardware-wise, though, that's about it.
In general, Macs last longer than a PC in the same hands. For example, despite my warnings to get a Mac a friend of mine (who isn't particularly computer literate and tends to break or virus computers like crazy) decided to get a cheap computer. It worked "fine" (it was terribly slow due to it being a first-gen Vista machine that should have shipped with XP and he didn't want to upgrade the RAM...) And then the BIOS randomly got courrupted so he bought another computer and has spent with those two computers plus various repair bills (power cord broke, tray-loading CD drive broke, etc) he could have bought a Mac that would have lasted him.
First, it's important to realize that things are not "random" in a true sense. If your friend's BIOS got corrupted, a bad program or something he did corrupted it. And breaking a power cord or CD tray sounds extraordinary to me. How did he manage that, and what makes you so sure he wouldn't be able to accomplish that with a Mac? Sure, a slot-loaded CD drive takes care of the CD tray problem, and the magnetic power cord means that there are fewer ways to break the power cord, but someone who's clumsy or careless is going to find a way to break computer equipment. Such a person is just as likely to accidentally break the display or fry the keyboard.
Riiiight, because we all know that when the iPod Touch and iPhone came into existence there was plenty of cheap devices with multitouch screens with wi-fi and a decent browser. I forgot about all those. Oh wait, there weren't really any of them. If you needed one, you bought an iPhone (or iPod Touch) or went without it.
I don't think the point is that early adopters don't usually pay more for novel items. I think the point he was trying to make is that even for what it did, it cost too much at the time for most people. And lowering the price on an item that is no longer novel isn't so innnovative. There are now several media players with touch screens, Internet access, etc. Sure, the multitouch is relatively novel, but even for that, you can get an iPod touch from several generations ago.
Not quite. If you (the customer) purchase stolen goods then you can lose them without compensation as they are returned to their rightful owner. I'm not sure the same is true if you purchase goods which infringe copyright.
I wasn't referring to a legal right to confiscate property. I was referring to the terms of service, which give the user the right to legally purchased digital content. Because the transactions weren't legal, they don't count as legally purchased content, and therefore the user doesn't have a right to them under the terms of service. That's how Amazon could justify deleting the content. If it was a legally purchased book, they could never have done that without fear of legal repercussions.
They were never free to just shrug their shoulders, say "Oops!", and pretend nothing happened.
If they had shipped an infringing physical book, they would have said "Oops!" and simply paid damages to the copyright holder. They wouldn't break into the homes of all their customers and retrieve the books.
Part of the difficulty with this situation is that Amazon would've never made this mistake with a physical book. With a physical book, they've got all kinds of time to verify who owns the copyright to the book before they sell it on Amazon, and even if they did somehow (I don't know how...) make such a mistake and allow a physical book to get on the site without proper copyright, they've got all kinds of time between when the user orders the book to when the book ships. In that sense, it's a much easier transaction to put the brakes on. So it would never get to the point where they would be in this position.
Ultimately, it's Amazon's publishing model that's at fault. They've made it too easy to upload work that's not yours.
At the point of sale, everything was legal. Only afterwards did the seller have a change of heart.
It wasn't a "change of heart". The seller didn't have a legal right to the material, and the buyer didn't have the legal right to copy it (which he did through the purchase). At the point of sale, nothing was legal about the whole thing. The seller didn't have the right to sell it, and the buyer didn't have the right to copy it. The fact that someone pays for something doesn't automatically make the transaction legal. You could theoretically be charged a monthly fee to use a P2P service, but that doesn't mean that anything you download is automatically legal because you paid for it.
Sales are customer-initiated. Once the sale has completed, no further action should take place unless the customer initiates further contact.
The fact that the sale is customer-initiated doesn't ncessarily mean that "no further action should take place". What would happen if the purchase itself was somehow fraudulent (e.g., through credit card fraud)? You can certainly bet that there would be further contact at that point.
At worst, the customer was violating the terms of service. This does not warrant any arbitrary action on Amazon's part. The Software, by the way, does not include the books, and the Service does not mean reading books on the Kindle (although it does cover reading on the iPhone, say). Read all the applicable license information.
The Service includes downloading books. Violating the terms of service is not in itself illegal, of course. My point was that it's clearly spelled out in the terms of service that you may not use the service or the digital content illegally. Since Amazon did not have the right to distribute the ebook, that was not a "legal" copy of the book. Whether the police could come and access your computer to retrieve the ebook is irrelevant. The terms of service the user agrees to clearly says that this is not a legitimate use of the service, or the content. That's why the OP, in my opinion, was incorrect when he said Amazon was in violation of the contract.
By the way, are you an IP lawyer? Are you sure that possessing and reading illicitly copied books is illegal? I know that copying and distributing is, but I don't know that any individual purchaser was doing anything illegal.
As I've said (but maybe not in this particular thread), I'm not a lawyer. My opinion is based on what the RIAA has been doing for years, though. The fact that you pay for a book doesn't mean you necessarily have the right to copy it. That can only be granted by the copyright holder.
If I set up a music service that charged a fee to download music I didn't have the right to distribute, and you signed up for it, and paid the fee, your downloads don't suddenly become legal just because you paid a fee. The RIAA has successfully gone after all kinds of downloaders. What you're actually charged with is dependent on whether you know that you don't have the legal rights to the content, but it's still illegal. (Not criminally illegal, but civilly actionable.)
And if you don't think merely downloading copyrighted content is illegal, you might want to ask Jamie Thomas-Rassett about that.
And of course, that's even before the DMCA is taken into account.
I happen to be one of the people who purchased the Orwell book. I was surprised that the problem occurred, but I wasn't really surprised at the way they remedied it. I simply took it as, it was a transaction made in error, so they rescinded the transaction.
It's actually a logical extension of the electronic model. If a mistake is made in an electronic shipment (basically what happened here), the system can both delete the erroneously-sent content and refund the money. It's actually a system that Amazon has to have in place, given their publishing model. There has to be a way to allow users to upload material, yet be able to have a remedy when someone (inevitably) uploads copyrighted material. This isn't the last time this will happen. The next time, Amazon will just do things in a slightly different order.
Somehow what Amazon actually did is considered being handled "poorly"?
instead of paying the proper royalties for having sold the book they decided to retroactively void a contract between Amazon and the consumer. Only now are they realizing what they have done and attempt to repair the damage the way they should have done in the first place.
Granted, they didn't handle the situation well, but they also didn't void any contracts.
This is part of the terms of service which every Kindle user agrees to when they buy one:
No Illegal Use and Reservation of Rights. You may not use the Device, the Service or the Digital Content for any illegal purpose. You acknowledge that the sale of the Device to you does not transfer to you title to or ownership of any intellectual property rights of Amazon or its suppliers. All of the Software is licensed, not sold, and such license is non-exclusive. [Italics mine.]
The fact that the Orwell book was obtained illegally (i.e., without the rights holder's permission) means that that book was never a legitimate purchase. Users weren't entitled to keep it. This kind of thing doesn't operate on the Finders Keepers Principle.
Something else that's been bugging me is the offer regarding user annotations. Are those supposed to be stored elsewhere because if they aren't amazon just gave away that they don't just have a killswitch but also keep watch on what you do with the kindle.
Your annotations are saved along with the electronic book, both on the Kindle and on Amazon's servers. A while back Amazon announced the online storage of annotations. I was actually surprised at first that annotations were caught up in the Orwell fiasco, considering that they're stored in files independent from the book itself. I can only assume that the original copyright holder put the squeeze on Amazon, claiming that the notes were "derivative works" or some such thing, and that since the users didn't have the right to the books, they didn't have the rights to the notes. Or else the copyright holder didn't want the user to retain clippings of the book.
IANAL, and I don't mean to imply that either of those are valid reasons to delete the notes from the Kindle, but I could see the copyright holder's legal counsel trying that kind of argument.In particular, I could see a lawyer looking at the Kindle's clipping capability and wondering just how much of a book you could save as a TXT file (or a series of files) that way.
How else would you explain the 2 month time period that elapsed before a decision was made?
You may be over-simplifying the situation. The thing you have to remember here is that this wasn't a simple matter of Amazon shipping people the wrong color sweater. In essence, they shipped out stolen property. They were never free to just shrug their shoulders, say "Oops!", and pretend nothing happened. Their ebook business model depends on them rigorously defending the rights of IP owners. If copyright holders get the idea that anyone can just upload a copy of a work to Amazon without their permission, and start making cash off of it, the Kindle will fail. Of course, none of this is to say that Amazon handled the original situation well. What they probably should've done was to first make a statement about what happened, and then explain that customers should delete the books on their own, but if the user chose not to do that, it would be automatically deleted in an "update" after some predetermined date. (Of course, they would need to point to the part of the user agreement that allowed them to do this, but in this case, giving notice to users would've been the right thing to do, even if they weren't actually required to do it, legally.
But, as to the original question: The reason Amazon took so long to react after they made the mistake they did was simple enough to understand: There was undoubtedly some behind-the-scenes maneuvering with the copyright holder, and some bean-counting in terms of how much they could afford to pay out in credit should someone not want to re-download the book.
From what I can tell, the N900 is more of a Kindle adjunct than a replacement or substitute (as far as e-book reading goes). The attractive thing (at least, to me) about the Kindle isn't how much it can do (which, while you can do basic web browsing and even texting and GPS with it, isn't that much), but rather how well it works as a book reader. I don't care if it's an iPhone, an N900, a Palm Pre or anything else: A 3.5" LCD screen can't compete with an e-ink device for reading text. Certainly, if you read books that rely on graphics (textbooks with diagrams, art books, comic books, etc.), the Kindle in its current form isn't going to be much of a help. But the Kindle (and, to be fair, similar readers from other companies) is far better for reading than the PDA-sized kind of devices the N900 represents.
Sometimes, you don't want a do-it-all device. You just want a device that does one thing very, very well. That's not to say the current crop of dedicated ereaders are perfect. DRM definitely detracts from their usefulness, and because of the DRM on many formats, the non-DRM ereaders are somewhat less useful than their DRM'd brethren for commercial content. But that's a publisher problem, rather than a technology or a manufacturing problem. Just like with MP3 players, the content providers will eventually come around, once the platform proves itself.
The advantage that ereaders have is that they've had time to develop a good distribution system. I don't think you can get a lot better than the Kindle, in that regard. The payment and download are seemless enough that most people simply won't bother to try to download illegally. That's what eventually happened with MP3 players. Starting with the iPod, in particular, the distribution systems became simple enough that the average user could do it with no problem.
For the Kindle 2, you can use Savory. It's a version of Calibre (which he mentioned in the presentation) ported to run natively on the Kindle 2.
I've got the original Kindle, so I've been using Calibre to do the conversion on my desktop.
Erm, those terms of use are clearly in violation of the GPL.
The terms of use refer to the DRM software mechanisms they used to make the Kindle. As long as that software doesn't link to any GPL'd software, Amazon is on safe ground. They're not really doing anything different than Tivo is doing, in that regard, that I can tell. In fact, a lot of proprietary software runs on Linux.
I don't suppose the FSF is happy about it, but I don't imagine that they'd be holding back if they thought Amazon actually violated the GPL, either.
You mean to say that if I have the right hardware, I could conceivably get free wireless access (at least to Wikipedia) anywhere -- and there's no system of authentication to shut it down without shutting down every existing Kindle?
Actually, Amazon has built pretty good authentication into the system. The system stores:
1) Your Amazon account information
2) Your credit card number
3) Your location (via the GPS)
So if you do decide to piss Amazon off, like someone else implied above, you might as well just sit down, have a cup of coffee, and wait for the black Amazon helicopters to land on your lawn.:)
I can't say for sure, but I imagine the reason he said "YES BUT DON'T DO THAT" isn't because it doesn't work, but because neither Amazon nor Sprint intended the Kindle to use the 3G connection for heavy browsing. (Otherwise, it wouldn't be free.)
Amazon has locked people out of their store (and the Kindle accounts) before for misbehavior. Best-case scenario, if you go wild, is you'll find yourself without access to the online bookstore and/or your Amazon account. Worst-case scenario, probably, is having to pay a hefty bill for the access and losing access to Amazon and the Kindle bookstore.
I can't and don't claim to be an expert, by any means, but I think the other thing you have to keep in mind is that it's a good proof of concept. If Ubuntu can be put on it, that might mean that other, slimmer distros might be able to be put on it. What if you could take Android or WebOS, rework them to move a cursor around for item selection (rather than through touch), and run that? Either of those would obviously have no problem running on a 3G network, and you'd have the kind of light apps that the Kindle should be able to handle.
Like I said, I'm not an expert, but being able to install a new OS on the Kindle does open up some possibilities, I think.
Granted, there are a slew of transhuman possibilities this opens up, and I think those should be pursued. But even from that perspective, I think it's in everyone's interest to make sure that the gulf between the healthy and the unhealthy doesn't get any wider than it already is. Sure, a healthy 70-year old should have the same vision they had when they were 18, but the unhealthy sight of an 18-year old blind person should benefit from this technology, as well, and probably first, because there's a supply and demand issue. If suddenly a whole demographic of people who used to use adaptive technologies suddenly don't need them anymore, then those that do need them will be pinched more for them, and, in some cases, they might have to do without altogether, if the technologies are no longer economical for companies to produce. You end up then with a world where there are some people who are even more disadvantaged than when you started. (How are people with limited vision supposed to deal with a world in which the average menu is now printed in Arial 2 on a 3x5" piece of electronic paper?
If, instead, you improve the vision of either everyone together, or the handicapped first, you have a smaller impact on the economic end (because there are a lot more people who have age-related vision problems than have abnormal vision problems) and you're triaging much better.
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Don't the first few billion years of earth's history provide strong evidence against that idea?
I wouldn't think so, necessarily. The key phrase I used was Earth-like. I wasn't trying to imply that just about any rocky planet we found was bound to have intelligent life on it (although I think a lot of them will probably have some life on them, even if it's just algae-like), but I think if it's got rocks, an atmosphere (maybe oxygen-rich, but maybe not), and, of course, enough time to do it in, I don't see why it should evolve that much differently from our own. Maybe I'm thinking too intuitively, but I would think that if you have that kind of potential for life, you're going to get lots of lower forms first, just like we did, and that those forms are going to have to compete, and that intelligence would have its advantages. (Whether it is an advantage over size or speed in any given situation is a toss-up, I guess, but it should certainly give you some advantage, over being a dullard.)
I find it almost impossible to believe that, if there's another rocky, Earth-like planet out there, that it doesn't have intelligent life on it. Whether we'd actually recognize intelligent life when/if we saw it is quite another question. If we found the extraterrestrial equivalent of dolphins, I'm guessing it might take us a while to discover their true intellect.
Many species can choose whether to reproduce sexually or asexually; they almost always choose sex when available because it gives so many advantages to their offspring.
This isn't intended as a jab, but is the word "choose" really appropriate here? "Choice" implies volition, whereas it was my understanding that environmental factors determined whether a species that could do either reproduced sexually or asexually.
It's fairly clear that we're the cause of an extreme extinction event (see Holocene Extinction event), and while it might not be the worst (which goes to the Permian-Triassic event), it is certainly dramatic and might win in terms of rate (number of species disappearing per year).
Granted, it's just Wikipedia, but the article you cite above demonstrates, better than anything else, that scientists currently have not the foggiest notion of the impact we're having on the planet's biosphere. Early in the article, we read this:
If this wasn't such a serious topic, the passage above would make me laugh my proverbial ass off. Not only have the "scientists" referenced abandoned the idea of documentation (a.k.a., "data"), but they've settled on a range of species extinctions with a 10,000% margin of error. If that's the best they can do with the data, you can't fault them for telling the truth, but it's hardly anything to hang your hat on, in terms of a theory.
Wikipedia has a broader article on major extinction events, and the Holocene event doesn't even rate as "major". (It's listed in the "minor" event list.) The accompanying graph seems to bear that out (at least for marine life).
So, yes, humans are an abnormal influence on the planet, and in this context (introducing exospecies into a fragile environment), it's certainly relevant to separate the human influence from the norm (say, the previous hundred million years of evolution).
You're clearly missing the point. The question isn't whether human beings caused more extinctions than any other single species (or any other event, for that matter). Even if you blindly assume that that's true, that has nothing to do with whether or not human activity is "natural" or not. Human behavior has evolved the same way the species of any other species has evolved. We have needs for resources just like any other species does. Human activity, then, is no more "unnatural" than any other species' activity (the aforementioned ants or beavers, for example).
As for extremophiles, yeah, we probably can't kill all life on the planet. That's why I said "has a fair chance".
There's not a "fair" chance. Barring some planet-exploding technology (i.e., the planet goes "BOOM!!" in a Death Star-like explosion), it's not going to happen. There are plenty of things that do have a "fair chance" of destroying all life on Earth (e.g., a Moon-sized body crashing into Earth), and there are a lot of scenarios that would lead to no one posting on Slashdot for the next few billion years, but generally, the idea that we could destroy all life on Earth (or come remotely close to it) is nonsense. Sane environmentalism is focused on keeping it a habitable place for humans, and not breaking out the rosary beads every time another species of rat goes extinct. (Sorry. That last reference was my Catholic high school days coming back. *shudder*)
Irrespective of whether they had the right to ship the book in the first place, it was wrong to delete the book from what is essentially not their property.
If you're saying that it was morally wrong, that's a debatable point. The terms of the Kindle agreement, which users agree to, clearly allow them to do it.
Nobody is saying they should have redistributed the copies illegally.
The proper course of action would have been to never have a remote kill-switch in the first place. The fact that Amazon remotely deleted everyones copies of the copyrighted work did not remove their civil liability for copyright infringement. It might have made the copyright owner more palpable but had they chosen to sue Amazon, Bezos would have found himself none the safer.
Copyright violations are civil in nature (unless you're talking about something covered under the DMCA), so in order for a violation to be pursued, it would have to be taken to court. I suspect that what Amazon did was create an agreement with the copyright holder so that they wouldn't take Amazon to court on this. (Otherwise, I don't think they would've been able to offer the users the book to download again.) So while you're technically correct that the deletion of the books in itself didn't give Amazon any legal protection, in all likelihood they have a legally binding contract with the copyright holder that the holder won't pursue the copyright issue.
From a simple customer fairness perspective, Amazon's customers purchased the book in good faith. Amazon should have no more right, let alone capability to forcibly take the book away than a brick and mortar store has to force you to return a physical book. If you buy a physical book from Barnes & Noble and it turns out that the printer didn't have copyrights to produce it, B&N doesn't call you demanding you return the book-they resolve the issue between the copyright holder and publisher behind the scenes.
Amazon should be no different.
This is the crux of the problem: The situation Amazon found itself in wouldn't happen at a brick and mortar store. What happened in this instance would be the equivalent of someone dropping off a truckload of books at Barnes & Noble's headquarters, saying, "Hey, here're some books. Sell these for me, okay?", and getting paid for the books, and then Amazon turning around and selling them to the next people that walked in the (physical) door. That's generally not how a major chain bookstore does business, so it wouldn't have happened.
This was a problem with Amazon's distribution strategy from the beginning.
> In essence, they shipped out stolen property. 1) It wasn't stolen property.
In this instance, one could think of Amazon.com as something of a pawn shop. A pawn shop is not legally allowed to sell stolen goods, and if they do sell stolen goods, they reveal who they stole the goods to, and they're taken back from the buyer by the authorities. The difference here is that Amazon did the retrieving, but that's covered in the EULA and TOS.
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.
That's an interesting idea. I think it has to be stressed that Amazon's users agreed to let Amazon into the Kindle, though. Just like iPod/iPhone users agree to let Apple into their computers, and Windows users agree to let Microsoft into theirs. The biggest difference here is that Amazon actually removed software that a user paid for, but it's conceivable that you'd be in the same boat if you bought a piece of software on the Web with a virus in it, for example. Is a piece of antivirus software removing an infected application exactly the same situation? No, because in that case, the antivirus software isn't doing it for legal reasons. But it's still a piece of software removing something you paid for from your system, so it's not exactly an unheard of situation.
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.
The relevant agreements between Amazon and the Kindle user seem pretty clear that a) users own the Kindle, and b) users are granted a license to the content. That's not exactly the same as renting, as the license doesn't expire, but it's not the same as full rights, either.
But that's not really the issue. Book readers don't have full permission to do whatever they want with paper books, either. Sure, you can lend to a friend, and you can resell, but you can't make a copy of the book. That's what's at issue here, because when Amazon sells an e-book, they're not losing the copy they have. They're simply allowing the user to make a copy.
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).
The slippery slope is a logical fallacy. The ability to get one law passed does not imply the ability to get increasingly more stringent laws passed.
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.
1) The constitutional right to freedom of speech is not absolute -- and doesn't really apply here in the first place.
2) If the corporation owns it, they do have the right to tell you what you can do on thei
I think we can reasonably take "natural" as shorthand for "not influenced by humans".
How can that be reasonable when it is an absolutely false dichotomy?
People make the same error when it comes to "natural herbal supplements" vs. "drugs". (Chemicals are chemicals, no matter how they're created. If a compound has an effect on the human body, it can be toxic. Google "water intoxication". Anything "completely safe" is worthless, medically.) The actions of humans are no less "natural" than ants building a colony or beavers building a dam. We just happen to have the intelligence and opposable thumbs to manufacture more sophisticated materials.
We might have some competition for most disruptive force to ever appear on this planet (e.g. the first oxygen-exhaling organisms), but we're definitely the worst to appear in eons, and we're unique in that we're the first thing to appear that has a fair chance of killing off all life on the planet.
"Killing all life on the planet" ain't as easy as it looks. Even if we did our absolute worst and nuked each other all to Hell, while simultaneously letting global warming run amok, there would still be room, at the very least, for extremophiles.
Note: I'm not saying that's a good idea. I'm simply saying that one facet of human arrogance is the idea that we have the power to kill all life on the planet. We don't. You'd be almost as accurate if you said we had the power to destroy all life in the universe.
Basically what I'm saying is: come on, be reasonable. Of course humans are an abnormal influence on the planet.
Basically, you're incorrect.
The PC I'm typing this on has never gotten a virus. It's really not THAT hard if you pay even a little bit of attention.
You are a geek. You know something about computers. Most people don't. Just because -you- can keep your Windows install virus free doesn't mean that Joe Sixpack is going to be able to.
Here's the problem with that analysis: Avoiding viruses isn't a matter of technical knowledge. Most PCs come with some anti-virus software on them when you buy them. The minimum effort involved is keeping a subscription current. The maximum effort involved is browsing to a Web page, clicking an icon, and double-clicking it to install it. What about that is a "geek" skill? Millions of people browse the Internet every day. They wouldn't be able to get viruses, otherwise.
No, you get random kernel panics. About as often as I get a "random" bluescreen. (Last time it happened was a poorly-seated daughterboard; switching to a newer case fixed that problem, and it's been rock solid ever since.)
Yeah, but Windows still bluescreens from problems that you won't have with a Mac due to all hardware having Apple's drivers (no graphics cards drivers to mess with, etc). Both are improving though.
Strictly speaking, it's not solely drivers that cause BSOD's. They're caused by the interaction of the drivers with software. If a piece of software tries to do something it's not supposed to do with a piece of hardware, the driver can cause a BSOD.
And just like a BSOD, the same thing can happen with a kernel panic. The fact that the same comapny makes the hardware and the OS has cross-application significance, but a bad piece of software can still bring the system down, even if the drivers and OS are stable..
There's something magical about the Apple HARDWARE that makes you more productive? Really? Last I saw, it was still a monitor, mouse, and keyboard -- everything else comes down to software & drive layout, and last I heard powermacs weren't used for render farms.
The multitouch trackpad is pretty useful. I didn't think that I would use it much, but it really does make it easier. Plus, things are generally speced to be fast, yes this means you won't find any $300 Macs new, but it also means that you won't get the experience you got with Vista (underspeced machines that should have been running XP running Vista and being terribly slow).
The multi-touch trackpad is cool. I'll give you that. I don't know how useful it is, because I don't know how much multi-touch is integrated into the UI. (I mean, I know you can zoom in on pictures, but can you, e.g., change font sizes in documents, highlight parts of columns in spreadsheets, etc.?) As for the notion of Macs being speced to be fast: There's really no trick to building a fast computer if you start off with a "Money is no object!" philosophy. Any yutz can do that with a couple days' research. The actual value comes in when you can find a system that hits the right price/performance balance (aka "bang for the buck"). The only passable argument I've ever heard in favor of Macs is that they last longer. That may be so, but computers have a built-in expiration date, because technology moves on. There comes a point when it's just cheaper to buy a new machine than to upgrade the one you have. Where that point is depends on what you want to do with the computer.
You can always tel when a fundamentalist freak enters the room -- simple failure of due diligence in verifying their distribution rights is immediately converted into the sin of "stealing".
I don't recall calling copyright violation a sin. It's an actionable offense, but not a "sin". (I think there are some pieces of legislation in Congress that elevate it to the level of a criminal act, but I do believe it's a civil matter, at this point.)
Spoken like a true patsy of the **AA and now of the publishing industry.
You might not realize this, but intellectual property rights are important. While we may disagree on how much the creators of content deserve to be paid (and that's what the marketplace is for), I think we all agree that they should at least get paid for their efforts. The problem here is that the right people were not getting paid. You can't legally buy something from someone who doesn't have the right to sell it to you. (The right to publish, in this case, is inextricably linked to the right to sell. These weren't second-hand books.)
Amazon should have withheld comment at all and engaged immediately in serious negotiations with the rightsholders. They would likely have been able to purchase rights for at least the mistakenly sold copies. At that point, they could have announced that they'd covered the buyers. If they were unable or unwilling to secure general rights, they could then have announced that the books were no longer available, but that they had preserved the rights to the copies already sold.
Unfortunately, there was more riding on this than simply the redistribution rights to books already sold. Part of the Kindle content distribution model relies on self-publishing through their DTP portal. After-the-fact negotiation concerning the royalties due was the easy part. Much more difficult was the task of trying to convince publishers and other copyright holders that they would act swiftly to stamp down on people trying to sell copyrighted works (where the copyrights were owned by someone else) in the Kindle store. That's what lead to Amazon's initial response. It wasn't solely about making that one individual copyright holder happy. It was about reassuring content producers that there was someone manning the gates.
I'm also doubtful that you can acquire rights a) after the fact, and b) for X number of copies. Authors generally hold the copyrights to their books. When Amazon sells a paper book, they're merely re-selling a book that was sold to them by the copyright holder. It's not the same situation as when Amazon stores a copy of an ebook on its servers, and allows people to buy it (thus duplicating the ebook in question, which, naturally, still resides on their servers after the purchase).
Withholding the information for that reason, and so as not to queer the deal with the rightsholders, would very likely have been accepted as prudent, good customer service.
See above. The problem with the strategy is that it doesn't address the distribution model Amazon has chosen, and doesn't assuage the fears of other publishers/authors that the same thing could happen to them.
As far as the killswitch goes, if they claim to remove it, I'd believe them as far as I believed Sony when they issued the "fix" to their rootkit. As for me, I wouldn't wipe my ass with Sony-branded toilet paper after that fiasco.
I doubt you'll ever hear of them removing the "killswitch", as you call it. Being able to remotely remove content from teh Kindle is one of the things they tout as a convenience, actually. It's used all the time, for example, when someone does a "return" of an e-book on Amazon. In that sense, the ability to remotely wipe books from the Kindle is a reassurance to some customers, that they won't be paying for a book that they don't like early on, or that they accidentally purchased by clicking the wrong button.
The problem here is, there's nothing you can "take back" (in terms of the actual copyright). You can't undo a copyright violation. It's like unbreaking an egg. Sure, you can limit the damage caused by the violation (e.g., seek damages, or get the books recalled, as Amazon did), but the actual book that's been copied isn't the violation itself. It's a result of someone violating your copyright. In fact, the book itself might not be the property of the copyright holder at all. In the case at hand, Mobireference actually published the books. The copyright holder had nothing to do with that (which is why they had a problem with it). So the physical (or in this case, electronic) part of the book wasn't "stolen", per se. What was stolen was the right to reproduce it. Retrieving the book and refunding the customers was just a way to undo the damage (lost revenue and unauthorized use of intellectual property) that the violation itself caused.
I'm not trying to say that the purchase of the book didn't represent a copyright violation on its own. (IANAL, but I think it did.) What I'm saying is that this wasn't about "retrieving" property, so much as it was about making it as if it never was distributed in the first place. (In that regard, I'm kind of surprised Amazon had the foresight to keep the notes attached to the ebook.)
Because its hard to get a virus?
"It's hard to get a virus" isn't the same as "It's secure". The reason it's harder to get a virus on a Mac is because the Mac platform isn't as popular. If you're going to try and write a virus, you want it to spread as much as possible, which means Windows, not Mac. (Yes, it's generally easier to run with admin privileges in Windows, but viruses are a user problem, not an OS problem. Convince a user that there's something he/she needs that your program or Web page will provide, and there aren't enough warning dialog boxes in the world to stop them from running it. (And by God, they'll run it as root, if they have to.)
Because its not going to randomly bluescreen?
Calling it something different doesn't make it more horrible. As Planesdragon says, a kernel panic is no different from a BSOD.
Because its hardware lets you do more things faster?
Not dollar for dollar, it doesn't. Take a group of same-speced machines from the Windows and Mac worlds, and you'll see that the Macs are always more expensive for what you get. The exceptions, of course, are things you generally can't get on a PC, such as multitouch touchpads (last I heard, anyway), magnetically-fastend power cords, etc. Hardware-wise, though, that's about it.
In general, Macs last longer than a PC in the same hands. For example, despite my warnings to get a Mac a friend of mine (who isn't particularly computer literate and tends to break or virus computers like crazy) decided to get a cheap computer. It worked "fine" (it was terribly slow due to it being a first-gen Vista machine that should have shipped with XP and he didn't want to upgrade the RAM...) And then the BIOS randomly got courrupted so he bought another computer and has spent with those two computers plus various repair bills (power cord broke, tray-loading CD drive broke, etc) he could have bought a Mac that would have lasted him.
First, it's important to realize that things are not "random" in a true sense. If your friend's BIOS got corrupted, a bad program or something he did corrupted it. And breaking a power cord or CD tray sounds extraordinary to me. How did he manage that, and what makes you so sure he wouldn't be able to accomplish that with a Mac? Sure, a slot-loaded CD drive takes care of the CD tray problem, and the magnetic power cord means that there are fewer ways to break the power cord, but someone who's clumsy or careless is going to find a way to break computer equipment. Such a person is just as likely to accidentally break the display or fry the keyboard.
Riiiight, because we all know that when the iPod Touch and iPhone came into existence there was plenty of cheap devices with multitouch screens with wi-fi and a decent browser. I forgot about all those. Oh wait, there weren't really any of them. If you needed one, you bought an iPhone (or iPod Touch) or went without it.
I don't think the point is that early adopters don't usually pay more for novel items. I think the point he was trying to make is that even for what it did, it cost too much at the time for most people. And lowering the price on an item that is no longer novel isn't so innnovative. There are now several media players with touch screens, Internet access, etc. Sure, the multitouch is relatively novel, but even for that, you can get an iPod touch from several generations ago.
Not quite. If you (the customer) purchase stolen goods then you can lose them without compensation as they are returned to their rightful owner. I'm not sure the same is true if you purchase goods which infringe copyright.
I wasn't referring to a legal right to confiscate property. I was referring to the terms of service, which give the user the right to legally purchased digital content. Because the transactions weren't legal, they don't count as legally purchased content, and therefore the user doesn't have a right to them under the terms of service. That's how Amazon could justify deleting the content. If it was a legally purchased book, they could never have done that without fear of legal repercussions.
They were never free to just shrug their shoulders, say "Oops!", and pretend nothing happened.
If they had shipped an infringing physical book, they would have said "Oops!" and simply paid damages to the copyright holder. They wouldn't break into the homes of all their customers and retrieve the books.
Part of the difficulty with this situation is that Amazon would've never made this mistake with a physical book. With a physical book, they've got all kinds of time to verify who owns the copyright to the book before they sell it on Amazon, and even if they did somehow (I don't know how...) make such a mistake and allow a physical book to get on the site without proper copyright, they've got all kinds of time between when the user orders the book to when the book ships. In that sense, it's a much easier transaction to put the brakes on. So it would never get to the point where they would be in this position.
Ultimately, it's Amazon's publishing model that's at fault. They've made it too easy to upload work that's not yours.
At the point of sale, everything was legal. Only afterwards did the seller have a change of heart.
It wasn't a "change of heart". The seller didn't have a legal right to the material, and the buyer didn't have the legal right to copy it (which he did through the purchase). At the point of sale, nothing was legal about the whole thing. The seller didn't have the right to sell it, and the buyer didn't have the right to copy it. The fact that someone pays for something doesn't automatically make the transaction legal. You could theoretically be charged a monthly fee to use a P2P service, but that doesn't mean that anything you download is automatically legal because you paid for it.
Sales are customer-initiated. Once the sale has completed, no further action should take place unless the customer initiates further contact.
The fact that the sale is customer-initiated doesn't ncessarily mean that "no further action should take place". What would happen if the purchase itself was somehow fraudulent (e.g., through credit card fraud)? You can certainly bet that there would be further contact at that point.
At worst, the customer was violating the terms of service. This does not warrant any arbitrary action on Amazon's part. The Software, by the way, does not include the books, and the Service does not mean reading books on the Kindle (although it does cover reading on the iPhone, say). Read all the applicable license information.
The Service includes downloading books. Violating the terms of service is not in itself illegal, of course. My point was that it's clearly spelled out in the terms of service that you may not use the service or the digital content illegally. Since Amazon did not have the right to distribute the ebook, that was not a "legal" copy of the book. Whether the police could come and access your computer to retrieve the ebook is irrelevant. The terms of service the user agrees to clearly says that this is not a legitimate use of the service, or the content. That's why the OP, in my opinion, was incorrect when he said Amazon was in violation of the contract.
By the way, are you an IP lawyer? Are you sure that possessing and reading illicitly copied books is illegal? I know that copying and distributing is, but I don't know that any individual purchaser was doing anything illegal.
As I've said (but maybe not in this particular thread), I'm not a lawyer. My opinion is based on what the RIAA has been doing for years, though. The fact that you pay for a book doesn't mean you necessarily have the right to copy it. That can only be granted by the copyright holder.
If I set up a music service that charged a fee to download music I didn't have the right to distribute, and you signed up for it, and paid the fee, your downloads don't suddenly become legal just because you paid a fee. The RIAA has successfully gone after all kinds of downloaders. What you're actually charged with is dependent on whether you know that you don't have the legal rights to the content, but it's still illegal. (Not criminally illegal, but civilly actionable.)
And if you don't think merely downloading copyrighted content is illegal, you might want to ask Jamie Thomas-Rassett about that.
And of course, that's even before the DMCA is taken into account.
I happen to be one of the people who purchased the Orwell book. I was surprised that the problem occurred, but I wasn't really surprised at the way they remedied it. I simply took it as, it was a transaction made in error, so they rescinded the transaction.
It's actually a logical extension of the electronic model. If a mistake is made in an electronic shipment (basically what happened here), the system can both delete the erroneously-sent content and refund the money. It's actually a system that Amazon has to have in place, given their publishing model. There has to be a way to allow users to upload material, yet be able to have a remedy when someone (inevitably) uploads copyrighted material. This isn't the last time this will happen. The next time, Amazon will just do things in a slightly different order.
instead of paying the proper royalties for having sold the book they decided to retroactively void a contract between Amazon and the consumer. Only now are they realizing what they have done and attempt to repair the damage the way they should have done in the first place.
Granted, they didn't handle the situation well, but they also didn't void any contracts.
This is part of the terms of service which every Kindle user agrees to when they buy one:
No Illegal Use and Reservation of Rights. You may not use the Device, the Service or the Digital Content for any illegal purpose. You acknowledge that the sale of the Device to you does not transfer to you title to or ownership of any intellectual property rights of Amazon or its suppliers. All of the Software is licensed, not sold, and such license is non-exclusive. [Italics mine.]
The fact that the Orwell book was obtained illegally (i.e., without the rights holder's permission) means that that book was never a legitimate purchase. Users weren't entitled to keep it. This kind of thing doesn't operate on the Finders Keepers Principle.
Something else that's been bugging me is the offer regarding user annotations. Are those supposed to be stored elsewhere because if they aren't amazon just gave away that they don't just have a killswitch but also keep watch on what you do with the kindle.
Your annotations are saved along with the electronic book, both on the Kindle and on Amazon's servers. A while back Amazon announced the online storage of annotations. I was actually surprised at first that annotations were caught up in the Orwell fiasco, considering that they're stored in files independent from the book itself. I can only assume that the original copyright holder put the squeeze on Amazon, claiming that the notes were "derivative works" or some such thing, and that since the users didn't have the right to the books, they didn't have the rights to the notes. Or else the copyright holder didn't want the user to retain clippings of the book.
IANAL, and I don't mean to imply that either of those are valid reasons to delete the notes from the Kindle, but I could see the copyright holder's legal counsel trying that kind of argument.In particular, I could see a lawyer looking at the Kindle's clipping capability and wondering just how much of a book you could save as a TXT file (or a series of files) that way.
How else would you explain the 2 month time period that elapsed before a decision was made?
You may be over-simplifying the situation. The thing you have to remember here is that this wasn't a simple matter of Amazon shipping people the wrong color sweater. In essence, they shipped out stolen property. They were never free to just shrug their shoulders, say "Oops!", and pretend nothing happened. Their ebook business model depends on them rigorously defending the rights of IP owners. If copyright holders get the idea that anyone can just upload a copy of a work to Amazon without their permission, and start making cash off of it, the Kindle will fail. Of course, none of this is to say that Amazon handled the original situation well. What they probably should've done was to first make a statement about what happened, and then explain that customers should delete the books on their own, but if the user chose not to do that, it would be automatically deleted in an "update" after some predetermined date. (Of course, they would need to point to the part of the user agreement that allowed them to do this, but in this case, giving notice to users would've been the right thing to do, even if they weren't actually required to do it, legally.
But, as to the original question: The reason Amazon took so long to react after they made the mistake they did was simple enough to understand: There was undoubtedly some behind-the-scenes maneuvering with the copyright holder, and some bean-counting in terms of how much they could afford to pay out in credit should someone not want to re-download the book.
From what I can tell, the N900 is more of a Kindle adjunct than a replacement or substitute (as far as e-book reading goes). The attractive thing (at least, to me) about the Kindle isn't how much it can do (which, while you can do basic web browsing and even texting and GPS with it, isn't that much), but rather how well it works as a book reader. I don't care if it's an iPhone, an N900, a Palm Pre or anything else: A 3.5" LCD screen can't compete with an e-ink device for reading text. Certainly, if you read books that rely on graphics (textbooks with diagrams, art books, comic books, etc.), the Kindle in its current form isn't going to be much of a help. But the Kindle (and, to be fair, similar readers from other companies) is far better for reading than the PDA-sized kind of devices the N900 represents.
Sometimes, you don't want a do-it-all device. You just want a device that does one thing very, very well. That's not to say the current crop of dedicated ereaders are perfect. DRM definitely detracts from their usefulness, and because of the DRM on many formats, the non-DRM ereaders are somewhat less useful than their DRM'd brethren for commercial content. But that's a publisher problem, rather than a technology or a manufacturing problem. Just like with MP3 players, the content providers will eventually come around, once the platform proves itself.
The advantage that ereaders have is that they've had time to develop a good distribution system. I don't think you can get a lot better than the Kindle, in that regard. The payment and download are seemless enough that most people simply won't bother to try to download illegally. That's what eventually happened with MP3 players. Starting with the iPod, in particular, the distribution systems became simple enough that the average user could do it with no problem.
For the Kindle 2, you can use Savory. It's a version of Calibre (which he mentioned in the presentation) ported to run natively on the Kindle 2. I've got the original Kindle, so I've been using Calibre to do the conversion on my desktop.
Erm, those terms of use are clearly in violation of the GPL.
The terms of use refer to the DRM software mechanisms they used to make the Kindle. As long as that software doesn't link to any GPL'd software, Amazon is on safe ground. They're not really doing anything different than Tivo is doing, in that regard, that I can tell. In fact, a lot of proprietary software runs on Linux.
I don't suppose the FSF is happy about it, but I don't imagine that they'd be holding back if they thought Amazon actually violated the GPL, either.
You mean to say that if I have the right hardware, I could conceivably get free wireless access (at least to Wikipedia) anywhere -- and there's no system of authentication to shut it down without shutting down every existing Kindle?
Actually, Amazon has built pretty good authentication into the system. The system stores:
:)
1) Your Amazon account information
2) Your credit card number
3) Your location (via the GPS)
So if you do decide to piss Amazon off, like someone else implied above, you might as well just sit down, have a cup of coffee, and wait for the black Amazon helicopters to land on your lawn.
I can't say for sure, but I imagine the reason he said "YES BUT DON'T DO THAT" isn't because it doesn't work, but because neither Amazon nor Sprint intended the Kindle to use the 3G connection for heavy browsing. (Otherwise, it wouldn't be free.)
Amazon has locked people out of their store (and the Kindle accounts) before for misbehavior. Best-case scenario, if you go wild, is you'll find yourself without access to the online bookstore and/or your Amazon account. Worst-case scenario, probably, is having to pay a hefty bill for the access and losing access to Amazon and the Kindle bookstore.
I can't and don't claim to be an expert, by any means, but I think the other thing you have to keep in mind is that it's a good proof of concept. If Ubuntu can be put on it, that might mean that other, slimmer distros might be able to be put on it. What if you could take Android or WebOS, rework them to move a cursor around for item selection (rather than through touch), and run that? Either of those would obviously have no problem running on a 3G network, and you'd have the kind of light apps that the Kindle should be able to handle.
Like I said, I'm not an expert, but being able to install a new OS on the Kindle does open up some possibilities, I think.
Granted, there are a slew of transhuman possibilities this opens up, and I think those should be pursued. But even from that perspective, I think it's in everyone's interest to make sure that the gulf between the healthy and the unhealthy doesn't get any wider than it already is. Sure, a healthy 70-year old should have the same vision they had when they were 18, but the unhealthy sight of an 18-year old blind person should benefit from this technology, as well, and probably first, because there's a supply and demand issue. If suddenly a whole demographic of people who used to use adaptive technologies suddenly don't need them anymore, then those that do need them will be pinched more for them, and, in some cases, they might have to do without altogether, if the technologies are no longer economical for companies to produce. You end up then with a world where there are some people who are even more disadvantaged than when you started. (How are people with limited vision supposed to deal with a world in which the average menu is now printed in Arial 2 on a 3x5" piece of electronic paper?
If, instead, you improve the vision of either everyone together, or the handicapped first, you have a smaller impact on the economic end (because there are a lot more people who have age-related vision problems than have abnormal vision problems) and you're triaging much better.