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

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Oct 05, 2020, 3:24 PM UTC

GoblinSlayer wrote: post #208

slightwinder wrote: post #137

It's really time for laws which forbid companies to terminate accounts and access to them if they met certain conditions like licencing digital properties. Sure, they can restrict them all they want, as long as a fair stance prevails und people are not ripped of their goods. This strong difference in powers between companies and customers in the digital realm becomes more and more a serious problem. When people are s…

>There was a time in Europe when a strong movement for digital rights existed, but to bad it somehow died down. Did it? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirate_Party

Post by fakedang » Mon, Oct 05, 2020, 3:27 PM UTC

bArray wrote: post #205

slightwinder wrote: post #137

It's really time for laws which forbid companies to terminate accounts and access to them if they met certain conditions like licencing digital properties. Sure, they can restrict them all they want, as long as a fair stance prevails und people are not ripped of their goods. This strong difference in powers between companies and customers in the digital realm becomes more and more a serious problem. When people are s…

This is why I like places like Humble Bundle, you literally get a download link with PDFs (as well as other formats). It encourages piracy of course, but then again the moment somebody else could view your content on a device you don't control - it was already copy-able. If the ebook publishers were motivated to, they would encode unique properties into the text of each download that uniquely identifies the transacti…

Post by SilasX » Mon, Oct 05, 2020, 3:38 PM UTC

beagle3 wrote: post #212

SilasX wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's on the right track, but it's not very helpful if the company is shutting down and out of money anyway.

Make the customers of digital goods first-in-line creditors. It's basically goods stolen from people, at the moment of shutting down - they should be first in line. Most companies don't shut down when they run out of their last dollar; Rather, they shut down when they have more liabilities than assets. The result would be that traditional creditors will demand an escrow for that digital data before giving any money (…

Post by BTCOG » Mon, Oct 05, 2020, 3:44 PM UTC

Post by nobodyandproud » Mon, Oct 05, 2020, 3:46 PM UTC

beagle3 wrote: post #214

jerf wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As is often the case, a lot of these things are either illegal in the US too, or far less settled than the companies would have you believe. The companies stick them in the license clauses anyhow, because when you can just stick a severability clause [1] in there, why not grab things willy-nilly? Plus a lot of people simply assume there's no recourse even when there in fact is ("the US is an anarchist wonderland wher…

> "the US is an anarchist wonderland where consumers have no protections at all" is a harmful and false meme, what we have is the widespread assumption that consumers have no protections The biggest problem is that the US legal system is incredibly expensive. You can have justice, but only if you tens or hundreds of thousands of $$ to spend and prevail. In theory, everyone can get their day in court and (likely) enjo…