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Amazon turned off customer’s Kindle account, blocking her from her books (2012)

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Re: Amazon turned off customer’s Kindle account, blocking her from her books (2012)

#91

Post by f1refly »

Qahlel wrote: post #90
f1refly wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the other hand, I dont think victim-blaming is an excuse for rampant and continuous ignorance either. At some point, after getting abused again and again, users are to blame. All this shouldn't suprise any of them, it's in the ToS after all. Some users read the ToS and made an educated choice, some didn't read them and decided to not participate in any business with a company that obfuscates its goals in a 50-page…

You cannot avoid the TOS. They are all designed to protect the seller not the buyer. On top of that, you -as a single consumer- has no choice to select parts of the TOS. It's a unilateral-contract by definition.

You, as a comsumer, always have the right to not accept the ToS and take your money elsewhere. Amazon fortunately doesn't have a monopoly on the ebook market.

Re: Amazon turned off customer’s Kindle account, blocking her from her books (2012)

#92

Post by f1refly »

Moru wrote: post #7

This is true not just for Kindle books. It's also your games library on Steam and all other similar stores. GOG.com is probably the only online game store where you realy own the stuff you "buy".

The only game I play of game I'd notice if it where taken away is counter strike global offensive, which wouldn't really run all that well without valve backing it, so I'm okay with that.

Re: Amazon turned off customer’s Kindle account, blocking her from her books (2012)

#93

Post by underdeserver »

DarkWiiPlayer wrote: post #83
underdeserver wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All money and interest is not enough. If sign a contract that you will provide me a service and you back out of it midway, I'm usually worse off than if you had declined the engagement in advance. For example, if I contract you to build me a house, it takes six months, and three months in you decide to back out and pay me back with interest, I still have half a house I need to demolish or else I have to find someone…

This doesn't transfer well into this example though. You could argue that if you lose a library of 100+ books you also lose information on what those books even where, but a better solution for that would be to just demand some machine-generated list of what you had so you can buy them again somewhere else.

There's other lost value. What if a book is out of print or out of publishing? What if you had comments? What if you had bookmarks?

What if you brought your Kindle on a two-month-long hiking trip to South America and they don't sell them over there?

Re: Amazon turned off customer’s Kindle account, blocking her from her books (2012)

#94

Post by kelnos »

underdeserver wrote: post #20

Honestly? I'm okay with this business model. I know it's not a popular opinion here - but as there's no reasonable way to prevent people from unrestrictedly distributing copies, the business model of licensing books sounds reasonable to me. What's not reasonable is the lack of transparency when you're suspected of abuse. I understand that there are many bad actors, but these companies are judge, jury and executioner…

I'd also like to see requirements that companies aren't allowed to use terms like "own" or "buy" when referring to their content. They should have to use a term like "license" or even "borrow" to drive home that you're not paying for unfettered ownership.

I get what you're saying about preventing copying being impossible without DRM, but I think you overestimate the prevalence of unauthorized copying, at least when the convenience and cost of purchasing a legal copy is reasonable enough.

DRM has other bad societal effects, like locking up works beyond their copyright expiration, and causing people to lose access to those works if the company goes out of business (for DRM systems that require periodic license refreshes). DRM also generally disallows all legal copying under fair use terms.

I think the only way that I'd be even remotely comfortable with DRM is if companies using it were required to place their DRM keys in escrow; if the company ever decides to stop offering the service, or simply goes out of business, those keys should be released to the public. And companies should be required to remove DRM from works when its copyright expires. Even with all that, though, I'd still find DRM undesirable.

Re: Amazon turned off customer’s Kindle account, blocking her from her books (2012)

#95

Post by syshum »

Qahlel wrote: post #90
f1refly wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the other hand, I dont think victim-blaming is an excuse for rampant and continuous ignorance either. At some point, after getting abused again and again, users are to blame. All this shouldn't suprise any of them, it's in the ToS after all. Some users read the ToS and made an educated choice, some didn't read them and decided to not participate in any business with a company that obfuscates its goals in a 50-page…

You cannot avoid the TOS. They are all designed to protect the seller not the buyer. On top of that, you -as a single consumer- has no choice to select parts of the TOS. It's a unilateral-contract by definition.

At one point in time, One-Way non-negotiable contracts where unenforceable and considered coercive. I wonder when / why that changed when we added "on the internet" an called it is "Terms of Service"

Re: Amazon turned off customer’s Kindle account, blocking her from her books (2012)

#96

Post by accountLost »

Does anyone here have some experience using a kindle without account as describe here :

https://www.techjunkie.com/kindle-without-amazon-account/

Or here :

https://ebookfriendly.com/unregistered-kindle-pros-cons/

I think after some research that the oasis may be the best value for money reader for my use case (pdf CS books) but I'm not sure about the amazon account and if it is worth the hassle to avoid it.

Re: Amazon turned off customer’s Kindle account, blocking her from her books (2012)

#97

Post by giancarlostoro »

kranner wrote: post #58
hyperman1 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Note how this is in most jurisdictions illegal. You are now pirating, except you paid for it.

Is it really illegal? At least in the US cracking DRM for personal backup is not infringing AFAIK. https://gizmodo.com/its-perfectly-legal-to-tell-people-how-t...

This is what makes ROMs for games for game consoles fully legal assuming you ripped them from physical copies. Not sure how anyone would prove you didnt generate the copy yourself.

Re: Amazon turned off customer’s Kindle account, blocking her from her books (2012)

#98

Post by giancarlostoro »

gambiting wrote: post #41
romwell wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but with Kindle at least you can strip the DRM of your eBooks. There's a Calibre plugin[1] that does it. If you really care about ebooks that you purchase, I highly recommend installing this plugin. It automatically strips DRM off books you download and open with Calibre. And keep a back-up of the (DRM-free) books somewhere that's not Amazon / a cloud. Because a cloud is simply a computer that you do not own . […

Well, but that's like saying that you can download cracks for video games, so it's all fine. There are ways to make steam games work without steam, yet I wouldn't consider that to be a solution.

I sorta used to do this so I wouldnt need to pop in a CD just to play some games cause the CDs were getting really scratched up as things were.

Re: Amazon turned off customer’s Kindle account, blocking her from her books (2012)

#99

Post by AnssiH »

josh_fyi wrote: post #18

Please tag this as 2012. It would be interesting to see a summary of this issue since then -- has Amazon made this into a regular problem for their customers?

I already was thinking "huh, so maybe the Norwegian case a decade ago was not an outlier", but nope, this is again that same case that was widely reported at the time and seems to continue to resurface at times.

Amazon claims in the article that one should not lose their access to their book library even if their account is blocked.

Re: Amazon turned off customer’s Kindle account, blocking her from her books (2012)

#100

Post by dalbasal »

f1refly wrote: post #38

It's always a bit alienating to me when people suddenly wake up with their stuff taken away and are all like "how could this happen to me? why did noone warn me about this? how could amazon _do this to me_?" and then go off on their ways and "buy" the next movie from them (in addition to the amazon prime membership they already pay for that for some reason only includes the 480p version of the movie). It's not like t…

Blame structures, intentional structures, not people. People are just buying books the way books are sold. They can go elsewhere is not a reasonable response in amazon's case, considering the % of digital book market do they own?

It's reasonable for the average person to expect stuff to be reaspnable.

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