Think You Own the Book You Bought for Your Kindle? You Don’t, Says Amazon.
by Peter Kafka
Posted on July 17, 2009 at 12:50 PM PT
Buy an e-book for Amazon’s Kindle recently? You might want to check to see if it’s still on your device. Kindle users are complaining that the e-commerce giant has removed titles from their machines this week and given them refunds in their place.
What happened? The details are fuzzy, but apparently, a publisher that supplied Amazon (AMZN) with two George Orwell titles has decided that it doesn’t want to sell them via Amazon anymore. So away they went.
Readers described their experiences at this Amazon forum, and one of them included this note she said she received from Amazon customer service explaining what happened:
The Kindle edition books Animal Farm by George Orwell. Published by MobileReference (mobi) & Nineteen Eighty-Four (1984) by George Orwell. Published by MobileReference (mobi) were removed from the Kindle store and are no longer available for purchase. When this occured, your purchases were automatically refunded. You can still locate the books in the Kindle store, but each has a status of not yet available. Although a rarity, publishers can decide to pull their content from the Kindle store.
Normally, I’m pretty cavalier about the complaints that people make about the evils of digital rights management–the locks and restrictions distributors often attach to digital media like music, movies and books–but this is the sort of incident that gives those gripes some gravitas. If you’re buying bits, you ought to own those bits, just as you would when you plunk down dollars for a CD, a book or any other physical item.
Doubly confusing: As far as I can tell, Amazon’s license terms don’t have any loophole that allows for this. The section on “digital content” explains that I don’t have the right to “sell, rent, lease, distribute,” etc., the stuff I buy from Amazon. But it sure looks like stuff I buy, I keep:
Upon your payment of the applicable fees set by Amazon, Amazon grants you the non-exclusive right to keep a permanent copy of the applicable Digital Content and to view, use, and display such Digital Content an unlimited number of times, solely on the Device or as authorized by Amazon as part of the Service and solely for your personal, non-commercial use. Digital Content will be deemed licensed to you by Amazon under this Agreement unless otherwise expressly provided by Amazon.
So, what am I missing here? I’ve asked Amazon for comment, but if anyone has any bright ideas, sound off in comments below.
UPDATE: Amazon says the copies it sold were “illegal”, because the publisher never had the rights to them. But it says that going forward, it won’t be removing books from customer’s Kindles “in these circumstances”.
Comments
So what happens when Amazon decides it no longer wants to support the Kindle iPhone app? Will all of my books there just disappear too?
Posted by Michael Long at July 17th, 2009 at 1:43 pmNowhere in that agreement do I see the word “sold”. Instead, I see that you pay a fee to Amazon (they didn’t you that you pay a purchase price), and they licence you to use the ebook in some way. IANAL, but this looks to me that they implictly retain ownership.
Posted by Stewart Midwinter at July 17th, 2009 at 2:48 pmStewart is right, however this does not exscuse Amazom from a clear and terrible marketing tactic. I find or hard to imagine that Amazon included that portion of the agreement. This was probably a compromise pushed by the publishing agent. But who in their right mind (Amazon) would ever agree to market a book under those terms. This issue is not about right or wrong, it’s about smart/stupid. If Amazon thinks that most if any of their customers read licensing agreements/EULA, they are out of their minds. Regardless of whether or not they have the right to refund copies of material, it is not a good move from a customer satisfaction perspective and will hurt the company. I for one has considered buying a kindle, but without a doubt I have decided that I will not be
Posted by Edward Jackson at July 17th, 2009 at 3:44 pmbuying anything ebook related from Amazon, and will probably never shop on their site again! This is precisely why the government needs clear rules and regulations (moreso than already established) regarding digital propery
Here’s a wild guess. Amazon screwed up and did not actually have the right to sell the books in the first place. If correct, they were infringing copyright to the tune of each unauthorized copy of the book out there. So they made a decision to pull the copies and piss off users rather than take the exposure.
Still does not reduce the creepiness factor here. But hey, what technology giveth, technology can taketh away.
Posted by jim kirkland at July 17th, 2009 at 4:35 pmHow perfect that books removed were by George Orwell!
Orwell might not have appreciated having his copyright violated (if Jim Kirkland is right), but I think he would have appreciated the doublespeak in Amazon’s explanation, and its Big Brother treatment of its customers.
Posted by Carroll Lachnit at July 17th, 2009 at 4:56 pm