If something erases data from my computer without my consent, yes, it is my enemy!
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.