

Making sense of the '1984' Kindle kerfuffle - jgfoot
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13512_3-10290133-23.html

======
mechanical_fish
This is a decent summary of the situation, but the editorial comment at the
end is tone-deaf:

 _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..._

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
_renting_ books for an indefinite period.

(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 _keep_ a book I'll stick with the paper version.)

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 _makes you the owner of the book_ and that it will behave as
real books do.

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.

I'm a little bit hopeful that this debacle will help accelerate the decline of
ebook prices.

\---

[1] If you define current copyright law, which effectively ensures that
everything invented after Mickey Mouse will remain under copyright forever, as
"justice".

------
Create
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:

 _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._

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.

------
ars
Interesting, but I don't know if it's so valid.

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.

Just because Amazon _could_ delete it, doesn't mean it _should_. At least not
until ordered to do so by a judge.

~~~
BearOfNH
The analogy with a car is specious. There is just one car, as opposed to
unlimited copies of a file. Plus the State has vested interests in automobile
ownership and licensing. If on the other hand you had a stolen copy of _1984_
on your coffee table I very seriously doubt the police would bother to repo
it, believing it to be a civil matter.

My wife (who actually IS a lawyer) goes even further. If you bought your hard-
copy of _1984_ in good faith (say, from a bookbinder who sold it to you
instead of rebinding it for a customer), then in fact you ARE the legal owner
of the book, and the customer who got screwed has to seek restitution from the
bookbinder -- who might also wind up in jail guilty of fraud. I'm not sure
that's justice but according to my wife, that's the law in our state.

------
anigbrowl
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).

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.

~~~
derefr
> It would be very interesting to know if Kindle copies were deleted in the
> countries where the book is in fact out of copyright.

They likely were. I'd say that the copyright covers the information in
Amazon's central Kindle database, which is presumably under US jurisdiction,
and that all the other devices simply reflect any changes in this database
unless you hack them not to.

