This is a decent summary of the situation, but the editorial comment at the end is tone-deaf:<p><i>Somewhat regrettably, I think, Amazon has pledged to stop doing what it did in this case--which was, I think exactly the right thing to do...</i><p>Amazon's action may have served the narrow interests of justice [1], and may even have been necessary to avoid big legal penalties, but it was terrible marketing. The last thing Amazon wants to do is to remind people that a Kindle is not a tool for reading books that you own. It's best viewed as a tool for <i>renting</i> books for an indefinite period.<p>(I actually like the Kindle, and am still thinking of getting one someday, but I have no confidence that a DRM-protected Kindle book will outlive the hardware it lives on. To me, the Kindle would merely be a way to streamline the process of buying a book, reading it, and then selling it again. If I want to <i>keep</i> a book I'll stick with the paper version.)<p>The problem is that rental has lower profit margins. People's mental model of book rental is based on the library, where the apparent price is "free". A Kindle book's big profit margin is dependent on the illusion that buying the book actually <i>makes you the owner of the book</i> and that it will behave as real books do.<p>And, of course, there's no tradition of people banning cars they don't like, then having the police drag those cars away. But there is a long tradition of book-banning and book-burning that Amazon is unwise to evoke.<p>I'm a little bit hopeful that this debacle will help accelerate the decline of ebook prices.<p>---<p>[1] If you define current copyright law, which effectively ensures that everything invented after Mickey Mouse will remain under copyright forever, as "justice".
No. You are missing the point: this incident was not an accident, a bug or a mishap. The featureset of the Kindle was deliberately premeditated to ensure the fulfilment of the requirement that allows for the revocation of the Right to Read. Effort has been spent to have this capability. It is Chekhov's principle:<p><i>If in the first act you have hung a pistol on the wall, then in the following one it should be fired. Otherwise don't put it there.</i><p>And judging the book in question by its cover, one might be tempted to think, that it was a bait: and apparently the well educated, clear-headed lawyers/managers who pulled the plug had obviously no idea what they were doing. If they knew, then all the worse.
Interesting, but I don't know if it's so valid.<p>Precedence in the US is if someone sold something in violation of copyright, the purchasers don't have to return it, instead the publisher is fined, with the money going to the copyright holder.<p>Just because Amazon <i>could</i> delete it, doesn't mean it <i>should</i>. At least not until ordered to do so by a judge.
An unecessarily egotistical article, but I didn't realize the fuss was over a copyright dispute (tl;dr 1984 digital edition put out by someone on the basis that it was out of copyright in several territories).<p>It would be very interesting to know if Kindle copies were deleted in the countries where the book is in fact out of copyright. And I'd like to see some serious (rather than moralistic) discussion of how we should approach differing copyright terms in a wired world.