When the law for copyright was changed the actually law that was been pushed was no time limit, if you got a copyright it was for ever ownership. Lawsuits are the only way this will come up, so I love to see a few of them not so much against Amazon but to really bring out Copyright laws and how they have become a way to make another buck. I am all for copyright for the originator but not copyright for a corp. to just control for ever.

Lucky for us this is not yet a big deal in Science or we are all going to really pay a price.

Good article on copyright law
http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article.cfm?articleid=378

However, the West Palm Beach police did not dig through the company’s sales records and track down customers to raid their homes and seize the illicit goods.

It’s one thing to remove the copies from the servers. It’s also in the same boat if a use “synced” their device and accidentally erased their copy of the ebook. However, I’m with LuYu.. when Amazon begins removing the copies from a user’s Kindle device… that’s crossing the line.

I was reading at the NYT’s article about a student who was reading 1984 for a summer course… and was taking notes on the book in his Kindle. When Amazon “repossessed” the book – they also took his notes and his “work”.

This is not “selling” me on Kindle!!

Under the DMCA, Amazon was obligated to remove the illicit copy as soon as they heard about it.

Absolutely correct. “Amazon was obligated to remove the illicit copy [from their servers] as soon as they heard about it.”

The problem is: They also deleted local copies on people’s private Kindles. I understand the syncing program will do this automatically, but the issue still remains. Remote deletion from private devices is a violation of the Kindle owner’s property rights (unlike information, the Kindle itself is hardware, and therefore, physical property).

Not that I’m saying that’s the way it should be… but with the Kindle service, that’s the way it is, and every potential customer should consider that before buying into the service. (Personally, I’d opt out. But that’s me.)

And remember that copyright violations is in no way related to theft in the eye of the legal system, theres simply no precedence for any court to have ever accepted any argument conparing copyright violation to theft, were in a whole different ballpart here, and in the civil law system monetary compensation is the norm.

Fair use exist to limit the publishers ability to control who get to reed their works, you cannot use copyrigt to limit critisism of published works, nor can you keep books from one market from apering on a different market.

What amazon did here would be highly ilegal if it had been real books. They have a reson for doing it because they are the ones violationg copyright and have to pay the fines so ofloading the problem to the consumer is cheaper.

This is a problem with E you often throw away any comsumer protection there might be, suddenly you can limit critics access to work through click-wrap licensees(those clauses have been spotted in the real world) you can keep markets seperared through DRM, you can eliminate the secondhand market and all sorts of funny things the publishers have always dreamed about.

BTW i smell someone setting amazon up here just to test how willing amazon is to use delete when commecial interest are threatened.

Recently I bought Stephen King’s “Salem’s Lot” and started reading it. When I discovered TTS was off I went back to the store to check it out, and it was gone. It had been COMPLETELY removed from the store (no “coming soon” or anything). But the version I bought was still in my archive and stayed on my device. They CHOSE not to remove it from my device…or else THIS is the default behavior (which is what I suspect). There would be a LOT of processing overhead to check my 100+ books against the store every time I turn on my wireless and take down anything that isn’t available anymore!

This case is a little different, in that they had planned on putting “Salem’s Lot” back, reportedly because it had formatting errors…and they did in fact later put it back (not sure if it has the same ASIN or not).

But my point is, removing something from the store doesn’t AUTOMATICALLY do anything. Amazon CHOSE to remove “Animal Farm” and “1984″ from everyone’s devices, and it’s just plain wrong. Like Bob W said, it was Amazon’s responsibility to make this right by compensating the copyright holder, not reneging on the sale to the customer. They admitted as much and said they won’t do it again, which is nice.

It would also be nice if their “automated system” that they are blaming this on could be enhanced with a LITTLE smarts….like bouncing the title off a database to look for suspected piracy attempts. It’s not like this is the first time this has happened! And this would not be hard to do….this isn’t video or audio…it’s TEXT for crying out loud. Parse the title, hit a database, flag the suspects, and put a little human intervention in there for crying out loud

I agree it’s not trivial but what I’m concerned about is the assumption that Amazon can remove items from the purchasers library at will. The fact that they can technically do this is not the issue.

What if this was a “Satanic Verses” situation and Amazon employees had received death threats. Should they be able to remove the books from my library and refund my money to avoid the potential threat?

What if they were facing a boycott over “The Pagan Christ”? Can they remove it from my library because the boycott would hurt them more then the potential sales?

As the thread and the NYT article suggests, this is a good time to give serious thought to the inherent differences between print and electronic books. We tend to think of e-books as products in the same way as we think of printed books as products, IOW, you should be able to do the same things with them. This is clearly not the case, and this episode effectively demonstrates that. There are differences, and those differences will affect how we sell books, how (or IF) we can loan or resell them, how we use them, and what happens when they are gone.

I’ve seen the same thing happen in a corporate setting when a crew of lazy/incompetent centralized IT used a windows folder synchronization feature to implement “backup” services on the cheap. When my boss moved to their centrally managed hardware from our locallybmanaged system they told him to put all his data in the officially designated folder. Which proceded to synch with the remote server folder. Which was empty.
Total nuke-job.
Years of data lost.
(of course, we had triple local backups. The boss sent the central IT drones packing.)

“Never attribute to malice what can be explained by simple incompetence.”

I’m guessing a patch is coming to Whispersynch pretty soon to prompt users.
I’m also guessing that a lot of users are boning up on Kindle DRM-cracking today.

Both are good things.

The fact that they feel justified in removing the book from the Kindle owners library for any reason is why people are upset.

It’s a very bad PR week.

Suppose a user buys a Kindle edition of Book X, reads halfway through and discovers significant formating errors or missing text

1. The user asks for a refund Book X
2. Amazon gives the refund and removes Book X from the user’s account.
3. The user turns on Whispernet and the Kindle seesBook X is no longer on the user’s account, then it automatically deletes it because the user no longer owns it (or owns the rights to it if you prefer)

Suppose a Kindle is stolen or sold secondhand and the the account gets deregistered. When the Kindle syncs to Amazon, it sees no books on a valid account, and then deletes all media bought from Amazon. This is, I think, as it should be.

Now suppose Book Y is an illegal book that was sold on Amazon.

1. Amazon must remove Book Yfrom the store
2. Amazon must remove Book Y from all accounts that bought it to prevent further downloads; once a book is know to be illegal, they can’t allow it to be download again even if a customer has paid for it
3. Once Book Y is removed from the user’s account, the Kindle has to remove it because that is the way it was programmed and it makes sense to do so

So my question if anybody who is upset: How could Amazon remove an illegal book from its store and user accounts while not having the Kindle automatically delete it?

Maybe they could create exception rules to sometimes allow this or that book to remain on the Kindle when it is not on the user’s account, but there would have to reasons to allow those exception rules. Now imagine the brouhaha if Amazon permitted exception rules that allowed customers to keep illegal books.

Amazon, you may have noticed, doesn’t exactly have the best quality control when it comes to what they let people self-publish on their site. Lest we forget, Amazon allowed someone to sell her bad Star Wars fanfic novel for months before someone pointed it out to them and they shut her down. These things happen.

It’s awfully hard to get too upset about this given that the books, apart from being illegal, only cost 99 cents in the first place. Is stolen property really covered by the Doctrine of First Sale?

And then upload it to the folder that has all my free books… not the one Kindle syncs with.