Amazon is not the enemy
arvindn.livejournal.com
arvindn.livejournal.com
http://www.informationweek.com/news/personal_tech/drm/showAr...
As for the enemy being DRM itself instead of Amazon, I'm not sure it's DRM as much as fragmented or proprietary 'standards' that are the problem for casual users just trying to experience frictionless media. Consider the cross-device annoyances of unprotected WMV, DIVX, or Flash, for example. I understand why Amazon and Sony want to protect their "software" sales, but am disappointed that these protected books are not cross compatible. Both ebook stores have a limited selection, yet each device meets a usability niche.
On that point, I also would argue against the final jab from the article:
"can we stop making silly comparisons between the Kindle and Sony's or whoever's two-bit book reader that no one's ever heard of?"
In December 2008, Sony said that it had sold 300,000 units of its Sony Reader since the device launched end of 2006. Meanwhile, TechCrunch says Kindle sold 189,000 units in 2008.
Originally, however, the Sony Reader was available only through Sony and Borders. Sony began selling its Reader and related accessories in Target stores at the end of 2008.
By mid-2009, Sony Readers are sold at Apple stores, Best Buy, Borders, Brookstone, Costco, Fry's, Office Depot, Sam's Club, Sears, Staples, Target, Walgreens, Walmart, and many web retailers including Amazon. It is also available in the UK in Waterstone's, Dixons, and more. The Kindle is available from Amazon.com in the US only.
Given the Sony Reader's wide retail distribution, it's unlikely "no one's ever heard of" it, and purely anecdotally, I feel I see more of them on planes.
(Disclosure: I own an original Sony PRS-500, a newer Sony PRS-505, and a Kindle DX. My leisure books are on the Sony Reader for ergonomics, battery life, and travel. My technical books and documents, both Word and PDFs, are on the Kindle DX for the screen size, though it needs to be recharged from dead every few days.)
I am aware of that, and indeed Amazon's ability to see right from wrong and admit that they messed up is part of what prompted me to write the article.
"In December 2008, Sony said that it had sold 300,000 units of its Sony Reader since the device launched end of 2006. Meanwhile, TechCrunch says Kindle sold 189,000 units in 2008."
Point taken. Perhaps I was biased by my own anecdotal observations. I've seen half a dozen Kindles "in the wild," i.e, not counting early adopter friends, but not one Sony Reader.
But in terms of the data, note that you're comparing Sony's worldwide sales with Kindle sales in the U.S. Besides, the numbers you quote are from Mark Mahaney, who later revised his estimates to 500k for 2008, which would mean almost a million up until now. http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/20090203/citi-says-amazon-so...
1) Amazon did something stupid.
Changing the adjective is clever, but it's still an outrageous act. They went on YOUR machine and they DELETED something YOU PURCHASED. You BOUGHT IT. There is nothing more to say here.
2) Apple had the same problem with DRM and bent over backwards to accommodate labels. Now we're all happy.
Apple never DELETED files straight from people's computers. They never took the step of taking away what you bought. There is absolutely no comparison here.
The blogger also pleads for people to target the publisher. As if I can only be outraged at one company! I'll target both, thank you very much.
Think of it like a doctor selling you a medicine, then calling you up and saying, "Oops, I wasn't authorized to give you those pills. I need them back, and I'll refund you entirely."
There's a difference between removing an e-book and refunding it.
The doctor wouldn't break into your house and take the pills out of the medicine cabinet.
Perhaps I don't have the same feelings regarding owning a copy of somebody else's work. I don't feel ownership towards ebooks. I feel ownership towards the money I spend, but if I get that back I wouldn't be mad at what Amazon did. That's a minority opinion, and I think it would be worth debating somewhere that's not here.
This of course implies that the doctor would be within his rights if he caused no disorder. "I wouldn't trust a doctor to...". You didn't trust Amazon to either -- they just went in and did it, at someone's request.
Hmm.. why does this prescription bottle have an antenna on it...
If you don't like DRM, buy paper books or only download those that are already in the public domain.
Sure DRM is a hassle, but so are a lot of things. For the most part, though, the problems with DRM are due to stupid business decisions and not even bad technology implementation -- consider Apple iTunes -- if your hard drive fails you have to re-purchase everything (with a single exception).
DRM just means that more content is available -- if DRM truly does impose costs/hindrance, then eventually it will go away. In the meantime, you are free to choose it if you want (or not to). There are many books that are in the public domain that one might read as an alternative to 1984.
Or you could, like, make backups. Which iTunes even pleads you to do.
They have let me do this once before.
Apple offers the worst of all worlds by imposing DRM and also not allowing a simple re-download option.
I really don't want to spend $100 on a backup drive and then have to back up my iTunes folder after every purchase. That is totally not how things should work in 2009.
Notably, all my other data (code, documents, etc.) is easy to back up (documents on google docs, code on github)... so the only thing I ever need to worry about is music.
For the second crash, I had way more content than the 30GB capacity of my iPod -- my backup drive died and only 30GB were on the iPod.
This is just silly considering that I've spent probably thousands of dollars in the iTunes store and I haven't downloaded any illegal content since the first day I started using iTunes years ago.
The point of DRM is that it should be able to allow Apple to risklessly let me re-download content. As it stands, and as someone else pointed out, Apple gives you one "lifetime" re-download for whatever music you own at the time. I have used mine, and incidentally I ended up losing about $50 worth of music which Apple claimed it no longer sold, even though the items were clearly still available in the iTunes store.
My point in mentioning backups was to show how unfriendly Apple's overall service is to customers. DRM is a technology which should be able to elimiate Apple's risk, allowing it to deliver superior customer service.
But sadly Apple has gone in the other direction...
I support companies that recognize property rights.
You obviously don't support property rights if you're willing to pirate products. You can recognize property rights by not buying their product and complain, that's your legal recourse for a market decision you don't like.
When you buy a creative product you are completely restricted in how you use it, regardless of if you bought a book, an e-book, a song or a CD. You can't use it for public events, you can't sell it on without the authors/publishers permission (in books the permission is implied hence legal, with e-books the permission is not implied hence illegal), you definitely cannot make copies. These are their property rights, they made it so they own every right and those rights extend implicitly from every post-it you write on to every photograph you take. Until you, or an author says, 'yes you can use that' (when you buy their product you have automatic right of private use) and if you ask an author if you can copy their book/song/movie and they say yes, well then you have that right. Until then it's a crime, that's why people get punished for it.
So please don't be ignorant and claim you support companies that recognize property rights, they all fully recognize them because they have ALL the rights. If PubCo Inc recalls its book it has to do everything in its power to retrieve the book, which can include legal action. It can happen with everything from cars to microwaves, it also could happen with a book. And it happened with an ebook, Amazon had a recall obligation and they got every single ebook recalled like they're obligated to.
Quit your whining, change the laws if you care so much because you obviously don't understand property rights and obligations if you're complaining a recall of a product goes against your rights.
If you own an illegal product through legal means, it's still an illegal product! Microsoft offers to replace your OS with a legal one if you can prove someone sold you an illegal copy of Windows and they've offered that for years, because they'd rather get the distributor than the purchaser. However it's your legal obligation to make sure the products you buy are genuine. Microsoft can still sue you for illegally owning a copy of their product, even if you paid someone full price believing you bought a real MS Vista. It's then your legal right to sue the person who defrauded you!
The only things in this world that you will legally own is your land and house. God forbid the zoning laws change or someone wants to put a bypass through your property. You can also own anything you make, so if you want to own your books, make your own. You want to own your computer? Make your own, out of parts you made yourself.
I don't even own my animals, because if I don't care for them like I'm legally obligated to, they get taken away by the SPCA.
How would buying those books send the right message? The way it sounds to me is "hey, take my books away any time you like, that's cool."
I mean, if you're happy with the Kindle DRM, sure, buy one. But if I'm not, how is it (even marginally) in my interest for me to buy one?
Oh, so to get rid of DRM, we should first swallow the pill and make ourselves dependent on it. Then, when we are completely at the mercy of DRM, it will magically go away over night. Makes sense - NOT!
Life always worked like this. Digital Restrictions Management stakeholders, like SONY rootkits are colluding with all antimalware vendors and major OS suppliers to be trusted (see HDCP, miniDP). The standard procedure in case of deadtree books [1], which are democratically banned by Human Rights Champions, is to wipe off the shelves wholesale by the censors, on consensus. And block any dissemination by showing no interest, like CW/YRO/Story Nobody Wanted. Although the information age makes old techniques more cumbersome, they still work surprisingly well, perhaps because of a lack of active interest from most people. And stuff just gets more complicated from this point...
[1] Look for this on Amazon: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hunt:_Me_and_War_criminals
The rule in the e-readers market is clear: do anything it takes to get content for your device.
1. Yes, they are rights protected by copyright law.
If they want to provide us with their Kindle store, which 99% of the time is excellent and wonderful (I just got the Kindle iPhone app and I love that it syncs with my Kindle and with the web reader), they have to deal with publishers that are antique and ignorant and full of themselves. Think the RIAA is tyrannical? The publishing industry is ten times worse.
It sucks that Amazon had to do this, but given a choice between a terrific store that's subject to the whims of publishers and no store at all, I'll take the terrific store, and hope that my Shakespeare and Austen remain intact.
Amazon is one of the few companies that I trust almost wholeheartedly. I don't think they're fuck-something-up-proof, but I believe firmly that the company as a whole cares about its users and about giving them the best experience possible, even when it's at cost to them. I've never had a bad experience with Amazon, whether it was as a customer or as a seller. I understand the kneejerk impulse here, which is to call Amazon an Evil Big Corporation, but I find it sad that a decade of building trust can be so quickly thrown out the door.
I don't care if amazon is good 99% of the time.
I don't care if BigPrint is the devil and amazon was coerced.
Nobody should EVER under any circumstance delete ANYTHING from my computer, even if I bought it or not, if it is pirated or not, if it is stolen or not.
If it was your mistake to allow that to happen you should ask politely and we should be able to decide what to do.
I hope Apple takes notices, I know they have a remote shut-down switch in every iphone. They better never use it.
Doesn't work like that. If you're a major digital salesperson and somebody's transmitting data illegally, as they were in this case, then it's your responsibility to withdraw the book. Amazon should have been much more polite about what was happening, but letting people keep illegal content was out of the question here. I understand that.
If this had been a legal publisher of 1984 suddenly switching positions, I'd agree that the user should have the choice. Considering it wasn't an authorized publisher, Amazon did the one thing they could.
Nobody should EVER under any circumstance delete ANYTHING from my computer, even if I bought it or not, if it is pirated or not, if it is stolen or not.
Really? Because I've always thought that deleting pirated content would be a great punishment for piracy. If I've stolen something, I have no right to it. That's implicit in the idea of piracy. Deleting the stuff I pirated seems like a harmless punishment.
What's unacceptable in meatspace is unacceptable in DRM-space. Stay out of my computer.
We should firmly be on the lookout for abuses of this power, but in this case:
* Amazon found out that they were accidentally distributing something illegal
* Amazon happened to have the power to fix their problem entirely, without missing a single copy of the illegally-published book
* This happened near-instantaneously, without anybody's time being wasted
* Amazon refunded every single person their money back, so they lost no money whatsoever
Amazon doesn't look scary, they didn't come in armed with weapons, they didn't illegally access anything. If I was in Barnes & Noble and bought a book, then was approached by an employee saying "We weren't actually allowed to sell you that copy of the book, here's your money back," I might be disappointed at not having the book, but Barnes & Noble retains the right to take that book back from me if they're also returning my money.
You know how we like to loudly trumpet that PIRACY IS NOT STEALING! because there's no physical copy and therefore no cost to how many times a file can be replicated? Well, that works both ways. When you're dealing with a thin sliver of data which can be modified without even a chance of damage to any other data, and when you have a moral imperative to remove that data and can do it without harm to anybody, then you have every right to jump back in and edit that data, precisely because it isn't meatspace.
That argument would make more sense if Barnes & Noble owned my computer, or if I were still physically present on their store's property.
(I'll also clear up, since I figure it'll be brought up in a moment anyway, that if Amazon had targeted copies of 1984 that weren't from their Whispernet store then I'd be more offended.)
That question is far from legally settled.
I just said I was going to bow out of this conversation, so I'll end my line of thought with this: A company has the right to do what it wants with its products, and when that company is Amazon and has made countless innovations that help me find the stuff that I want, when it gave me my second-favorite gizmo, and when it has not once in the near-decade I've been a member violated my trust, when it's one above and beyond to make me happy, then I'm going to look with skepticism upon claims that Amazon's removing an illegal book and offering a refund equates to a sacrilege of justice. The people comparing this with 1984 are bizarrely wrong.
All of the elided content in the above quote is presumably good stuff Amazon did for the commenter.
It is my impression that the commenter has just admited to being driven by personal experience (instead of objectively judging) when he said that Amazon removing an "illegal" book from the Kindle is not unjust.
I would have argued this position no matter what company had done it, because I think it's the right of the company. Mind you, if certain other companies has done this my stance would have been more along the lines of "They're allowed to do it, but they're assholes." Amazon, on the other hand, has never once done something to violate my trust. So when they do it, my reaction is "They're allowed to do it, and I can understand what made them do it."
I vehemently disagree with almost everything he is saying about Amazon deleting an ebook that I've purchased, but, he is _absolutely_ adding to the discussion in an clear, concise, and interesting manner.
Sometimes the HN "I disagree with this person so I'll try and make his comments dissapear" attitude drives me absolutely nuts.
Stop it already. Please.
Withdraw the book from further sales? Absolutely and no doubt. Withdraw it from people who already purchased it without doing anything wrong? Absolutely not. The legal questions are complicated and IANAL, but morally they had no right to remove something that was rightfully purchased and in use from people who had done no wrong.
letting people keep illegal content was out of the question here.
Hardly. The users did nothing wrong. Amazon (or arguably the publishers) made the mistake, the purchasers did nothing wrong. Any penalties (if proper) to be born should have been born by and only by Amazon.
Really? Because I've always thought that deleting pirated content would be a great punishment for piracy. If I've stolen something, I have no right to it. That's implicit in the idea of piracy. Deleting the stuff I pirated seems like a harmless punishment.
This is getting off on a tangent since this case is not about piracy (the customers did everything right and purchased the book, Amazon thought they were doing everything at the time).
But to go off on that tangent, no one should have the ability or right to delete anything or deliver any form of "punishment" without a judge being involved, and once it got to that point then simply deleting the files wouldn't be nearly enough.
But why not? Morally it would have been wrong to allow a leak of something that wasn't rightfully theirs when they had such a simple system set up to fix it all. It would have been wrong if they hadn't emailed every person who owned the book. It would have been wrong if they hadn't offered a refund. But they did, and they did. Amazon's been transparent about all of this.
Any penalties (if proper) to be born should have been born by and only by Amazon.
And they bore it, offered a refund, and sent out an apology. What sort of punishment do you expect them to have suffered otherwise? "Amazon must hang its head and look guilty cos it did a bad thing"?
But to go off on that tangent, no one should have the ability or right to delete anything or deliver any form of "punishment" without a judge being involved, and once it got to that point then simply deleting the files wouldn't be nearly enough.
I said on a separate thread of comments that I don't hold a very firm belief in ownership of data, unless there's money involved. In this case, Amazon gave me the data, encoded to work on their hardware, so I hold that they have the right to do whatever they want with the content on it so long as they don't take my money needlessly. They didn't.
Yes, morally it was wrong (though only by accident) for them to allow the leak. The problem is that they did allow the leak. It was done. You can't unbreak an egg and the only people for whom this came close to "fixing it all" where the publishers. The end users now do not have something they rightfully purchased. Yes, Amazon gave a refund, but that is not the same. Clearly the users valued having that book more than they valued the money otherwise they would never have purchased the book, so Amazon then took something without right or permission that was more valuable than what they gave back.
And they bore it, offered a refund, and sent out an apology. What sort of punishment do you expect them to have suffered otherwise? "Amazon must hang its head and look guilty cos it did a bad thing"?
I expect them to have worked out everything with the publisher so that the users who already made the purchase would not be bothered. This means paying any and all fees and fines applicable under copyright laws (or whatever they settled for with the publisher) for their accidental breach without the end users who already purchased in good faith being bothered in the slightest.
Is this different from flipping a bit on a server when I discover your registration key is illegit? If so, why exactly? How about if flipping the bit constructively deletes your file, i.e. if I disable your access to my encryption keys it might as well be 600MB of /dev/rand?
I really don't have too much sympathy for people who think they have absolute property rights because they're putting the data they stole on hard disks they own, darn it.
"Participants in the DRM debate implicitly hold the view that the ownership of your operating system, your personal information, and your media is a complex, joint relationship between you, your operating system vendor, the authors of the applications you run, and the owners of any media that pass through that application. Prevailing wisdom is that the way any given software behaves should be jointly determined by all these parties, factoring in all their interests, and that the argument is simply a matter of degree: who should be given how much control, and by what mechanism. I don't like to think of myself as an extremist, but on this issue, I can find no other position to take. When I hear lawmakers, commercial software developers, and even other open source programmers, asking questions like, "how much control should we afford to content producers in media playback programs?", I cannot help but think of Charles Babbage:
"On two occasions I have been asked [by members of Parliament!], 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question."
The "you don't own your computer" paradigm is not merely wrong. It is violently, disastrously wrong, and the consequences of this error are likely to be felt for generations to come, unless steps are taken to prevent it."
"Ethics for Programmers: Primum non Nocere"
http://glyf.livejournal.com/46589.html
I do, however, wonder how many could keep such an oath, esp. under present economic conditions. And most people, I think, will happily build, say, baby-mulchers if simply asked to - even without the threat of starvation. Human beings are sheep.
Ultimately, we, the programmers, are the foot-soldiers of DRM.