Comments on: Amazon Reminds Us — We Don’t Own Ebook Content

By: Holmes Wilson

Holmes Wilson — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 17:14:30 +0000

Re: In response to Amazon’s remote deletion of 1984 and Animal Farm

Hi there,

Saw you’d written about the Amazon / 1984 flap, and I thought you might be
interested in the petition we launched yesterday:

http://defectivebydesign.org/amazon1984

We have over 1400 signatures already, and signers include Lawrence Lessig,
Clay Shirky, Cory Doctorow and other notable authors, librarians, and
scholars.

The petition opens:

“We believe in a way of life based on the free exchange of ideas, in which
books have and will continue to play a central role. Devices like Amazon’s
are trying to determine how people will interact with books, but Amazon’s
use of DRM to control and monitor users and their books constitutes a clear
threat to the free exchange of ideas.”

Please have a look, and if you support the cause or think it would be
interesting to your readers, a blog post would be great!

Thanks,

-Holmes Wilson
Free Software Foundation

By: Techni

Techni — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 05:51:49 +0000

I remember when buying a product entitled you to certain rights. Ahhh, the good ol’ days

By: KG

KG — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 19:31:55 +0000

I’m surprised the Amazon story didn’t generate more coverage of the problems at Fictionwise earlier this year when the end of some distributor agreements caused some to have to download different alternate formats of book and cause some to lose books when alternate formats weren’t available.

Another PITA is authorization issues when servers change or firms go out of business.

As for Amazon, I even read the fine print but was still surprised and frustated by Unbox problems after dealing with how badly DRM handled a simple change in monitors or a repair vs clean install of an OS on another pc. The worst has been the near zero help from Amz customer service since the unbox app is such a black box.

My last gasp will be to use a drm stripper on newly downloaded unbox vids when I get my next pc. Then I’ll truly be done with Unbox for good.

By: SAM

SAM — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 16:32:10 +0000

They should come right out and say that your purchases are really rentals, just like going to the Video store
and renting a movie…of course they wouldn’t “sell” as
many eBooks then

What happens to your eBooks when Amazon discontinues
the Kindle program a few years down the road?

Are all of your books become useless/unreadable?

By: nyn

nyn — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 15:54:13 +0000

“This situation also shines the ugly spotlight on DRM in general.”

Well – that is what DRM is all about. SURPRISE!

By: heath

heath — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 13:47:59 +0000

Well, a follow up email from Amazon informed me that the removed copy of 1984 was an unauthorized self-uploaded copy from a publisher that didnt own the copyright. I understand and can sympathize with that, though the yanking of the “book” from my collection was a bit creepy and irritating. This “solution” is not helping to encourage me to buy things from their kindle store. When companies start brainstorming on ways to prevent and discourage pirating, I would hope they figure out that incidents like these aren’t helping.. at all.. I have a nice new copy of 1984 on my kindle. I didn’t get it from amazon.

By: John in Norway

John in Norway — Sat, 18 Jul 2009 09:56:21 +0000

This is why I’ve never bought into this DRM, cloud thing. I don’t want other people controlling my things. In fact, I’ve just bought, from amazon.co.uk ironically enough, a book and a CD. I’ll scan the book in so I can read it where, when and how I like. I already have the mp3s of the album but at least now I’ll have hardcopy backups which nobody can take away from me.
Maybe it’s because I read George Orwell as a young lad?

By: NBN

NBN — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 23:37:47 +0000

Another reason why I still prefer paper books!

By: cr0ft

cr0ft — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 22:47:05 +0000

… which is why I am extremely leery of buying anything with DRM and avoid it to the utmost of my ability. DRM is a consumer-hostile technology and has nothing to do with curbing piracy and everything to do with maintaining control and being able to charge, preferably multiple times, for media.

By: Oliver

Oliver — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 22:45:33 +0000

Well, one thing I know: Sony’s never getting their grubby little DRM fingers on my Sony Readers or its content :)

Lovely story.