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Outlawed by Amazon DRM

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Re: Outlawed by Amazon DRM

#321

Post by dripton »

mightybyte wrote: post #304
cs702 wrote: post #152

Could you ever imagine a local retailer in your area breaking and entering into your home, taking away all your books, and then not giving you a straightforward explanation as to why they did so? Me neither. Breaking and entering into someone else's physical property, and talking away their physical possessions without explanation is so obviously wrong and illegal! Yet that's pretty much what Amazon did to this poor…

I completely agree with you, but the consumer here isn't without fault. By purchasing a Kindle and DRM'd books for it, you're agreeing to Amazon's policies. It's true that kindle books don't work like regular books, but being ignorant of that fact isn't an excuse. This is why I categorically refuse to pay a single penny for any digital media that has DRM attached to it and might prevent me from playing it at any time…

Good for you. I also categorically refused to buy anything with DRM on it, until I caved and bought a Kindle last year. I figured the DRM on the Kindle was at least easy to crack, so I could make backups of my books to keep Amazon from stealing them from me. But I must confess that I haven't been diligent about backing up my ebooks.

Re: Outlawed by Amazon DRM

#322

Post by VMG »

guard-of-terra wrote: post #275
beedogs wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not really arguing whether one action is any better or worse than the other; seeding a pile of ebooks isn't really something for which any valid defense can usually be given. My point is that there's clearly a very large amount of effort being expended protecting the ever-expanding rights of content owners, and -- near as I can tell -- zero effort being spent protecting content purchased by honest consumers from…

"seeding a pile of ebooks isn't really something for which any valid defense can usually be given" How come? If you seed a pile of ebooks (let's assume it's a very big pile that contains a good chunk of books humanity considers important) than you're helping our culture spread. It is in fact very important for books to be massively copied in order to survive future catastrophes: whatever they come in form of nuclear…

Don't forget to share Hollywood blockbusters and AAA video games. The rebel alliance is counting on your support.

Re: Outlawed by Amazon DRM

#324

Post by msh »

mdasen wrote: post #266
belorn wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can not give explicit permissions in a ToS, and most importantly, you can not refuse or give away rights given by the law to protect the consumer. Both has declared so by the court in both US and EU. Every single time I have seen a court rule, and the defending company is holding up the ToS as their defense, the company has lost. Every. Single. Time. The only real difference, is that most courts do not give out p…

You cannot give away many rights, but what right would you be giving away? A lot of the time (and I'd assume in this case), Amazon is not selling you a copy of the book. As such, the legal rights that come with buying a copy of a book don't apply. Rather, you're purchasing something like "an indefinite, non-exclusive, non-transferrable, revokable license". As I stated in my previous comment, we might want to create a…

If amazon is not selling me a electronic copy of the book it should be illegal for them to call the button doing this transaction "buy".

Re: Outlawed by Amazon DRM

#325

Post by arandomJohn »

First a disclaimer: I think this is outrageous and hope that her account is restored.

Now my questions:

Does her account use her home address? That seems unlikely as she is in Norway but is dealing with Amazon US. What are the rules for purchasing content when you're not resident? Could this be the problem? If so that sucks.

Secondly, it appears that she began her Kindle odyssey with a used Kindle. Could that be what links her account to a fraudulent one? A unique ID from one of her devices has been used by someone else in the past?

Re: Outlawed by Amazon DRM

#326

Post by fluidcruft »

donniezazen wrote: post #296
joshnerius wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've often wondered about the viability of students purchasing or renting textbooks for the Kindle. Just imagine the panic/terror that would ensue if a student's collection of textbooks just disappeared in the middle of a semester. If my collection of novels disappears, I'm inconvenienced. If my collection of textbooks disappears, my academic progress is severely jeopardized. Both seem extremely wrong as you mention,…

First think came to my mind. I am reading textbook for a course I am taking. I am not taking any paper notes as I just highlight and take online note on Kindle Reader Webapp/mobile app. I would be devastated if I lose my bookmarkings and data.

If you would be devastated, why are you relying on something you cannot backup? That's not rational.

Re: Outlawed by Amazon DRM

#327

Post by mark_l_watson »

I have sympathy for the lady (and others) who lost their Kindle books.

However, I am going to take the opposition view here because I feel like people don't understand 'the beast' also known as Amazon.

Amazon optimizes on low margins, and cheap prices for goods (both physical and electronic). Amazon optimizes on the benefit to the mass majority of their customers at the expense of a small minority who do occasionally get "thrown under the bus."

I buy lots of Kindle books, but there are a few things I do to mitigate risk. First, for technical books I try to buy from publishers who have daily 30% to 50% off sales where I get PDF, a MOBI (Kindle format), and a iPub files. Secondly, I buy a physical book if I think that a book will have long term value (for example, I would read it several times during a financial meltdown when electricity is scarce, and we spend most of our time grubbing around for food - this has happened in Argentina, Russia, Iraq, etc., and it may well happen sometime in the USA). Thirdly, I buy "good deals" on the Kindle; for example, I am reading James Joyce's "Ulysses" right now and I only paid about $2 for it - a great bargain.

Re: Outlawed by Amazon DRM

#328

Post by _delirium »

smacktoward wrote: post #256
pi18n wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm one of the ones to leap out of the woodwork and shout that copying is not theft, so it's only fair that I point out this; torrenting is a massive copyright violation, as you are basically republishing the content. What Amazon did in this case is not against copyright, and the user had no claim to copyright of that work anyway. Make no mistake; I disagree with the humongous damages leveled against torrenters and I…

The user had no copyright claim on that work, but he/she did have a reasonable expectation that a "purchased" good was hers to dispose of as she saw fit after completion of the sale, within the confines of the law. What people are objecting to is Amazon's redefinition of the rights of the seller at the expense of the rights of the buyer.

It's also interesting how similar this is to the previous round, a century ago: the first-sale doctrine arose precisely to put an end to shenanigans publishers were trying to pull where they claimed they were only "licensing" a copy of the text to the person who purchased the dead tree. It reasserted the property rights of the purchaser, which companies now are trying to erode with the same "just licensing" shenanigans.

Re: Outlawed by Amazon DRM

#329

Post by realrocker »

I am really infuriated by this. It's high time one of us build's Kindle's competition. DRM "must" not be handled by the store. If DRM has to exist, it should be the prerogative of the author not the store owner. What the hell man!!

Re: Outlawed by Amazon DRM

#330

Post by Karunamon »

I understand the fear expressed here by a number of people that this might happen to them, but honestly? I think the answer here is pretty mundane and deserves a bit of perspective.

Some low level intern screwed up somewhere. While that hardly excuses Amazon for their exceptionally horrendous CS in this case (usually they're know for being good on that front), ask yourself:

  * How many customers does Amazon have?
  * How many instances of this have ever happened?
  * How likely is it to happen again?
The answers there are "a hell of a lot" (>100M), not many, and not very.

One cockup with one customer hasn't shaken my faith in Amazon's ecosystem. They're going to have to try a lot harder in order to achieve that goal.

Look at another platform like Steam. I'd say they have even more issues because they'll actually dismiss people from the service for things like card chargebacks or restrict multiplayer account-wide in case of cheating. They've had errors too. They're rare and statistically insignificant, just like in this case.

And for the love of god if you're going to downvote me, please at least bother to explain why so we can all learn something.

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