13 ms·

Amazon deletes purchased copies of 1984 from Kindle

320 points by KC8ZKF 17y ago

tjic 17y ago
I'm not usually one of the anti-DRM frothing at the mouth folks... but this screams out EPIC FAIL.
darkxanthos 17y ago
Awesome irony. As a side point, I'm pretty pissy about this and it didn't even happen to me. Just because you can doesn't mean you have the right, and it doesn't mean you should. We used to use these publisher bastards to help us determine what to read since we didn't have an efficient way of establishing credibility. Enter TEH T00Bz... We don't need these jack asses anymore. If I write anything, I'm going to e-publish.
frossie 17y ago
I actually had to check it wasn't April 1st. Oh the irony indeed. On the plus side: 1. This might focus people's attentions on the problems of buying DRM books - I am still astonished how little it bothers people. 2. For the love of all your deities, can we please revisit copyright laws. The man has been dead for 59 years. Surely we can all agree those books should be public domain by now. Death+70 is just too long.
- olefoo 17y ago
  Death plus 70 is just one instance of laws being purchased by special interests; and that is a tough problem.
  - derefr 17y ago
    At this point, I'd actually accept a special "Disney gets to make money from Mickey Mouse forever" law in exchange for shorter copyrights for everything else.
    - CWuestefeld 17y ago
      That's actually an interesting idea. Wouldn't it be a good experiment (and a nice comeuppance if it pans out) to see the unshackled media beat the pants off a stagnating Mickey?
      - dan_the_welder 17y ago
        Finally legal Mickey Mouse anime slash.
    - andreyf 17y ago
      There's probably a more realistic version - to put expensive-to-prove legal loop for extending copyright (but not as expensive as lobbying congress) so large corporations can take that option instead of breaking copyright for everyone. Another option would be to create a branch of IP "in between" copyright and trademark (which is indefinitely renewable). But IMNAL, so it might as well be my ass talking.
    - 10ren 17y ago
      Unfortunately, it would probably need to be "Disney gets to make money from all its copyrighted works forever". But I suspect Disney isn't actually that powerful itself, but it has sufficient resources and motivation to argue its case strongly before the appropriate committees - and then the many other powerful parties with similar interests rally round it.
  - CWuestefeld 17y ago
    I agree with the intent of what you said. But I'd like to point out that the phrase "special interest" is very loaded. If you're going to use the phrase, can you differentiate between a "special interest" versus just a plain old regular interest? It seems that people use "special interest" to denote interests with which they disagree. Those entities that they agree with are overlooked, despite the fact that all entities manifestly have their own interests. (I hesitate to cite specific examples for fear of forking out an off-topic thread for an OP that's already marginal)
    - olefoo 17y ago
      It is in the nature of special interests that they will always declare themselves to be acting in the public interest. I would agree that getting too specific is best left to discussions on another site.
    - andreyf 17y ago
      I think of "special" interest as the opposite (by some imaginary scale) of "public" interest. Public interest that which costs/benefits people equally - so things done "in the public interest" will benefit the majority of people. Democratic governments are good [1] because they tend to do things which are "in the public interest". Things done "for special interests" are those done for a minority at the expense of the majority - "special" because that minority has some sort of power (lobbying) that the majority of people don't have. 1. According to utilitarianism - the idea that the moral worth of an action is determined solely by its contribution to overall utility: that is, its contribution to happiness or pleasure as summed among all people [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utilitarianism http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utilitarianism]
      - CWuestefeld 17y ago
        We are told that actions like Kelo and Didden are in the public interest -- that is, to the benefit and betterment of the entire community -- but this is clearly bunk. How can we discern which of policies being espoused are really net-beneficial to society? I claim that in all but the most obvious cases, you can't. It's a fool's errand, and thus the term "special interest" has no use but in propaganda.
- umjames 17y ago
  I agree about DRM on books being bad. That's what I love about Pragmatic Programmers' e-books, I can get a plain PDF that I can read on any device that can read it.
  - sailormoon 17y ago
    Yeah, but the problem with that is that with PDF the page layout is really set in stone. What's appropriate for a 24" monitor may not be appropriate to read on your phone, or netbook, or what not. The best format, IMO, is plain HTML. It can come with a custom style sheet, or can be overridden to taste on the client. It can be read by anything, it can be endlessly adapted .. it's just the best overall solution, IMO.
    - scottdw 17y ago
      I know at least the clojure book (http://pragprog.com/titles/shcloj/programming-clojure http://pragprog.com/titles/shcloj/programming-clojure) is available in epub format which is essentially xhtml zipped with metadata files (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPUB http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPUB).
- tdavis 17y ago
  I'm astonished by how little DRM bothers people in general. The idea that I can buy something and not own it at the same time is ridiculous. It'd be like buying a car and having it taken back in 5 years. We make a distinction between "buying" and "leasing" for a reason. Except on the Internet, where everybody tries to get you to buy things and apply leasing rules to what you just bought. It's completely asinine.
  - andreyf 17y ago
    It's not "leasing", either, though - unless they're indefinite-time leases for a fixed price, with the right to "withdraw" the lease for a full refund. Most leased cars are returned, I imagine. Most "DRM-bought" Kindle books are not. So while "buy" isn't the right word, neither is "lease". It's a whole different beast altogether.
    - grandalf 17y ago
      Every purchase has terms of sale and a price. Whether those terms are dictated by the counterparty or by laws and social customs is irrelevant. You can buy a car but you can't drive it 100 miles per hour. You can buy 1000 smoke detectors, but you can't harvest the radioactive isotope and make a nuclear reactor. You can buy a book on paper, but you can't re-publish it as your own work, etc.
  - grandalf 17y ago
    Interesting. I'm always astonished by how much DRM does bother people. If a song costs $0.99 with DRM then it would cost more without DRM. Very simple. In most cases the DRM terms of use are acceptable to me, which is why I don't hesitate to buy DRM'ed content. Of course, many DRM implementations are highly annoying, but that is a design issue not a core issue with DRM technology.
    - tdavis 17y ago
      Why should the non-DRM version cost more? If anything, the DRM version should cost more, given all the time and work put into wrapping the item in some annoying "protection". In the vast majority of cases, DRM is only an annoyance. It doesn't stop anybody who really wants to share content from sharing it. The only things DRM does is give undue power to content sellers (like Amazon) and make content completely worthless when whatever technology is used to verify ownership stops working (or gets turned off like MSN Music, Yahoo Music...)
- potatolicious 17y ago
  This has turned out to be overblown, as usual. More info here: http://www.informationweek.com/news/personal_tech/drm/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=218501227 http://www.informationweek.com/news/personal_tech/drm/showAr... Somebody (third-party) decided to sell 1984 and Animal Farm on the Kindle Store without owning the copyright to it. Amazon is of course forced to take down said illegal posting. The only questionable part here is whether or not they should be allowed to delete purchased copies (with refund).
  - olefoo 17y ago
    Thanks for finding that, it sounds like that story came out somewhat after the story had already blown up. The detail that it was due to a self-service publisher who did not own the copyright is crucial. It sounds like Amazon could save itself a lot of the PR grief that comes with this sort of thing by posting takedowns and C&Ds on chillingeffects.org like Google does.
    - habibur 17y ago
      Illegal or not, the purchasers bought the books from Amazon's web site, not from some Hackerz site. Amazon later discovered that the books that Amazon was itself selling were somehow illegal, which the buyers need not have to be concerned about in the first place. Then instead of informing the buyers of it's mistake, Amazon decided to delete the copies outright, without any notice and of course without any talk of refund to the buyers. That's what I understand of this situation.
      - potatolicious 17y ago
        Then you misunderstand the situation. Amazon issued notice of the deletion (though did not clarify that the books were illegal), and automatically refunded money without the customers having to ask. I think they handled it as well as anyone can handle this particular situation.
        tdonia 17y ago
- yason 17y ago
  But isn't the reason to maintain copyright on this particular dead man's work to help him make a good living and thus greatly increases his ability to contribute with even more creations? Oh. Oh, wait...
Tiktaalik 17y ago
hah wow. strikes Kindle off "to buy" list
- deleted 17y ago
  [deleted]
- Skeuomorph 17y ago
  Sony Reader allows you to categorize your materials, while amazingly, Kindle doesn't have any hierarchy, just a long list. As a bonus, the Sony Reader doesn't have wireless DRM to remotely delete your books. That's not a bug, it's a feature. (I have both devices. The Sony is more usable while the Kindle DX handles full size business and engineering PDFs.)
  - evilneanderthal 17y ago
    You know, I had a Sony mp3 player a while back. One day the music library software updated itself and installed DRM retroactively on the device and I could never change the music that was on it; I threw it out after I got tired of hearing the same 12 songs. Yes, 12. 64mb storage =]
    - semiquaver 17y ago
      I'm almost positive that around the time of 64MB storage, Sony was still very against MP3 and refused to support anything but ATRAC3.
  - anatoly 17y ago
    You can use pdflrfwin to read full size PDFs on the Reader pretty comfortably. It can rotate the file landscape-wise, and cuts it into 2-3 chunks, smartly merging across page boundaries.
  - tdoggette 17y ago
    I still don't buy things Sony makes after their contempt for customers was put on display with the rootkit business.
  - 17y ago
asciilifeform 17y ago
Curiously, the full text of the book is prominently posted online in multiple places, for example: http://www.george-orwell.org/1984/index.html http://www.george-orwell.org/1984/index.html This could be because the copyright has expired almost everywhere.
- tomjen 17y ago
  He wrote it in 1948, which is post Mickey so it is still under copyright. Not that it matters, as you pointed out.
  - xiaoma 17y ago
    It's still under copyright in the US and UK, but not in Canada, where the copyright was "only" the author's life plus 50 years. http://www.netcharles.com/orwell/info.htm http://www.netcharles.com/orwell/info.htm
Elessar 17y ago
I felt Amazon had gained respect when they released their MP3 store without DRM. They have lost it today, utterly and likely irredeemably. There is no excuse for taking back what a customer has already purchased. None. And that they did so without even asking the customer? It should be considered outright criminal.
- tomjen 17y ago
  My guess is that it is actually illegal.
  - frossie 17y ago
    I don't know whether it is illegal. I am trying to figure out if this violates their TOS: Upon your payment of the applicable fees set by Amazon, Amazon grants you the non-exclusive right to keep a permanent copy of the applicable Digital Content and to view, use, and display such Digital Content an unlimited number of times, solely on the Device or as authorized by Amazon" Is that "or" a get-out clause? Because the first part seems to quite definitively rule out what they did.
    - req2 17y ago
      A similar case, in which a comma allowed an escape from a 5-year contract: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/article838561.ece http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/article838...
    - kschults 17y ago
      The most logical reading of the or is that you are allowed to display the content as many times as you want, and those displays may either be on the screen or in another manner that has been authorized by Amazon. That said, I'm sure their lawyers will be able to spin it as meaning that they grant you the right to keep the copy as authorized by them.
    - jmtulloss 17y ago
      Is a TOS a legally binding contract?
wmblaettler 17y ago
It would have been even more ironic if the book had been Fahrenheit 451.
macmac 17y ago
Does anybody know what happened to the owner's annotations?
- Xichekolas 17y ago
  Yeah wouldn't those annotations be copyrighted by the owner, and hence Amazon seizing them would constitute basis for case of appropriating someone else's work. Of course IANAL, I'm just speculating, and am 95% certain what I just said wouldn't have a leg to stand on.
  - sailormoon 17y ago
    How could a user prove their annotations ever even existed?
weaksauce 17y ago
What I do not get is how amazon can be so right on the DRM issue with regards to digital music and be so backwards on the DRM of books.
- blhack 17y ago
  It isn't amazon, it is the publishers. Somebody commented on my blog about this the other day, and nailed it pretty well: http://www.gibsonandlily.com/comments/4043/ http://www.gibsonandlily.com/comments/4043/
  - weaksauce 17y ago
    Great link! I am just surprised that amazon cannot explain this to the publishers. It would seem that they have a good deal of clout with the publishers being such an online presence. If they went the iPod route and once it gets on the device it is hard for the average person to get the data back off. That should satiate the publishers that they are not going to get easily ripped off. Of course the hackers here know to download a piece of software to transfer the songs off an iPod but 80%(not a real statistic) does not know how to do this.
    - irinotecan 17y ago
      Someone else above said the Kindle edition of 1984 was 99 cents. I'm sure the publisher is well aware of the benefits of having a kindle edition, but got greedy and demanded it be sold at a significantly higher price (or they get a much larger percentage of the gross). When Amazon balked, they took their marbles and went home.
  - andreyf 17y ago
    It's not the publishers, it's copyright law. Copyright law gives the publishers certain rights. Publishers are economic entities which maximize profits. Blaming publishers for exercising legal rights which maximize profit is like blaming rocks for falling on people.
    - 17y ago
blhack 17y ago
Does anybody know if amazon actively checks the books put on your kindle via their email service? There are a number of books that I own in dead-tree format (some of them, multiple copies in dead-tree format) that they don't offer in the kindle store. This sort of move really scares me; I have been contemplating moving some of them to the kindle (I have the books in .txt format).
timf 17y ago
"Upon your payment of the applicable fees set by Amazon, Amazon grants you the non-exclusive right to keep a permanent copy of the applicable Digital Content and to view, use, and display such Digital Content an unlimited number of times, solely on the Device or as authorized by Amazon as part of the Service and solely for your personal, non-commercial use. Digital Content will be deemed licensed to you by Amazon under this Agreement unless otherwise expressly provided by Amazon." From: http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=200144530 http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=2... The last 1.5 sentences seem to nullify the rest of the paragraph for all intents and purposes...
- tolmasky 17y ago
  Is that really how contracts work (honest question)? You can essentially put "just kidding" at the end of a contract and everything above it is nullified? If this is the case than those portions of the contract would seem to act solely for the purposes of deception.
  - lallysingh 17y ago
    Yup, just like the 'unless' keyword in Perl.
  - cschneid 17y ago
    Sorta, not really. Contracts have a lot more leeway than they look like. If the judge thinks you're being abusive in the writing of a contract, they'll say "nope, sorry, you lose", or throw out that clause and keep going. IANAL, etc.
svandoren 17y ago
The book is under copyright still in America. The Orwell estate is to be blamed for this, not Amazon, except they should be trashed for not vetting, properly, a book they thought was in the public domain.
keyist 17y ago
1984 the book only tells us about a bleak future. Amazon's Kindle policies show u that future. They're just following the maxim "Show, don't tell!" Obligatory link to Stallman's Right to Read essay: http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html Deleting the books is actually one of the more benign things they can do. What is truly scary is them or others changing the content of books Ministry of Truth style, without us realizing it.
- sailormoon 17y ago
  Your comment goes a little too far (this is not the full realisation of 1984, not yet anyway) but you do raise a good point. It introduces the first actual working memory hole; one of the key enablers of the 1984 regime. Imagine some little guy writes a controversial tell-all book, it's published. People buy it on Kindle. The guy is sued by The Man, loses, and any unsold books are pulped - plus, now, any Kindle books are recalled, or possibly revised. We have the technology ...
  - andreyf 17y ago
    And we have the legal basis, in some parts of the world (notably, China).
    - sailormoon 17y ago
      Well the worst thing is it seems like there doesn't even need to be a legal basis! Everything's under a "license", no-one owns anything. What's to stop a newspaper company retroactively editing the news? Their news? Hell the system is in place for that already. Most news syndication uses Atom or similar, that has support for "updates". We might be giving away more than we bargained for when we replace paper for mutable digitalia. We need to at least think about how we can address this systemic risk.
jknupp 17y ago
I had this on my Kindle and didn't realize it had been deleted until I read the story here. The email from Amazon is in the "Your Amazon.com Order #XXX..." format familiar to anyone who buys kindle content regularly, so many will not even realize this was removed. 1984 is literally my favorite book. I was happy to have it on my Kindle, readily available at all times. You would think, then, that I would be outraged by this. To be honest, after I got over the initial creepy "they went into MY device and deleted something" feeling, my (positive) feelings about either Amazon and the Kindle itself were unchanged. It's still an amazingly useful device that I get a ton of mileage out of, and they made a dumb mistake that just happened to affect me. I've been fully reimbursed for the title (all $0.99 of it), so no harm done. The concerns about Amazon randomly deleting content on your Kindle seem overblown. The ostensible purpose of the Kindle is to drive sales of Amazon's e-books. How would deleting customers' purchases on a frequent basis further that goal? I'm willing to write this off as a one-time occurrence, albeit an unfortunate and somewhat frustrating one.
- breck 17y ago
  Interesting comment. I feel like too many people are speaking up on HN just to speak (I wonder if the demographic has changed lately). I like this comment because it adds some data, not just an opinion or crafted argument. I come to HN to hear first hand accounts from people. jknupp's comment is a good example. Other great examples are when founders comment on articles about their companies, or programmers about their code, or authors about their articles. But above this comment, with 40+ upvotes, are a couple of comments where the commenter doesn't even own a kindle, nevermind having 1984. sigh.
  - sailormoon 17y ago
    Huh? Does owning a Kindle give you some special insight into the question of DRM, copyright, consumer rights, etc, inaccessible to others? How would owning a Kindle make you more qualified to comment on this development? Maybe a lot of people didn't buy the Kindle because they have compelling, well-argued positions on why they don't accept the limitations imposed on you by the product's terms and conditions. If anything those people are probably more informed on the issue than someone who just bought the latest gadget. Speaking up just to speak is a problem, yes. But if you're going to impose barriers to participation, let's have them be a little less arbitrary than "owns a Kindle".
maxniederhofer 17y ago
Just underlines the market opportunity for someone who is not beholden to publishers to launch an open ereader...
socratees 17y ago
That's shocking. esp. a book such as 1984. why would they do that? Did the customer service provide any specific reasons why the book was pulled out?
gojomo 17y ago
Next week, Amazon plans a special interactive commemorative edition of Fahrenheit 451 that will trigger a battery-overload, setting your Kindle on fire and destroying its entire contents.
deleted 17y ago
[deleted]
veritgo 17y ago
Nowhere near the same level of disappointment, but it is kind of sad that an article from the NYTimes lacks any mention that they tried to contact Amazon for a comment. Even a simple 'Amazon was called but declined to comment' would have been appreciated.
- sailormoon 17y ago
  What could Amazon possible say to defend their actions? The facts are plain to see. Personally I could do without their lame corporate spin, anyway. edit: why the downvotes? It's a sincere comment! When Sony installed frickin' rootkits on people's computers, did anyone say "wait, wait, let's wait for their side of the story"? Of course not. "Why" doesn't matter. What matters is that it can be done, that it has been done, and it might well be done again. Nothing Amazon says changes any of that. I stand by what I said.
  - andreyf 17y ago
    Um, Amazon could point out that the decision to withdraw the book was that of the publisher, and that they are legally bound to defend the rights publishers as defined under US law. Think of it this way - there are a couple of parties here. Both Amazon and most publishers are public corporations. That means they have a legal obligation to maximize shareholder value. The law allows publishers certain rights, and, in order to follow the law (maximize shareholder value), they must take advantage of those rights. Amazon, in turn, has a choice of forcing the publishers give up their rights under the law. Doing so would decrease the number of publishers that sell books. I imagine they did an economic analysis and figured that to maximize shareholder value, they must protect the publishers' legal right at the expense of common understanding of "readers' rights". So, where exactly is the problem here? Is it in people following the laws? I would say no: the problem is with the laws themselves. Which laws is an interesting question, one that is very much lacking discussion on this forum :(
- jrockway 17y ago
  It was a blog hosted by the Times, not an article in the Times.
rcoder 17y ago
From what I saw on the Kindle forums, the publisher of these editions (MobileReference) mostly offers $0.99 downloads of public-domain texts. There's a $10 version of 1984 still available for purchase from Amazon here: http://www.amazon.com/Nineteen-Eighty-Four/dp/B002A9JO9W http://www.amazon.com/Nineteen-Eighty-Four/dp/B002A9JO9W So, it looks to me like this was a case of a publisher illegally distributing a book to which they had no license. As an analogy, think of people who buy a bootleg DVD from a flea market while traveling overseas, only to discover it won't play in their region-locked DVD player at home. Yes, it sucks that DRM prevented them from using media they thought they had bought, but they also knew perfectly well that they were getting a deal that was just a little too good to be true.
- easyfrag 17y ago
  If this was indeed the case then the better solution would have been for Amazon to pay the royalties to the copyright holder on the previous sales and quietly remove the 99 cent version from the store. This is a public relations disaster for the Kindle. I disagree with your argument that people should have known this was too good to be true. Orwell has been dead for almost 60 years, 1984 will be public domain soon enough.
  - grandalf 17y ago
    disaster? are you kidding? I'm a kindle user and I could care less about this news.
    - adharmad 17y ago
      Sure, but what about potential loss of sales of the kindle by more privacy conscious users? Remember the Sony rootkit debacle a few years ago? No end users were really affected by it, but it was a huge PR disaster for them. Not saying that the current case is analogous but we cannot fortell how people will react to such sneaky behavior.
  - rcoder 17y ago
    That assumes that it was simply an issue of royalty payments. Publishing agreements can have many more restrictions (only authorized content, limits to which markets can be served, editorial veto, etc.) that aren't just about paying $0.20/unit. Regardless of the feasibility, I wouldn't expect Amazon to have any interest in creating a precedent of them paying to cover up for the mistakes of publishers on the Kindle store. Unlike many people, I actually think that yanking unauthorized books after download is totally reasonable, provided Amazon offers a detailed explanation of the reason.
jrockway 17y ago
This is a good thing. Nobody minds DRM when it doesn't bite them. When it starts fucking them over, they will start getting upset and stop buying intentionally crippled products. Then DRM will die. (Does DRM'd music even exist anymore?)
DannoHung 17y ago
One day, someone's gonna come out with a 8 1/2" x 11" eBook reader that doesn't look like it ran into the ugly tree at 80 mph that doesn't have any associated DRM and I am gonna buy the FUCK out of that thing.
DanielStraight 17y ago
Simple fact. If there is DRM of any kind, you do not own it. Period.
MaddHatta 17y ago
"Books simply disappeared, always during the night. Your name was removed from the kindles, every record of everything you had ever done was wiped out, your one-time existence was denied and then forgotten. You were abolished, annihilated: vaporized was the usual word."
timwiseman 17y ago
Incidentally, arstechnica has a detailed write up at http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2009/07/amazon-sold-pirated-books-raided-some-kindles.ars http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2009/07/amazon-sold-...

320 points by KC8ZKF 17y ago

tjic 17y ago

I'm not usually one of the anti-DRM frothing at the mouth folks... but this screams out EPIC FAIL.

Awesome irony. As a side point, I'm pretty pissy about this and it didn't even happen to me. Just because you can doesn't mean you have the right, and it doesn't mean you should. We used to use these publisher bastards to help us determine what to read since we didn't have an efficient way of establishing credibility. Enter TEH T00Bz... We don't need these jack asses anymore. If I write anything, I'm going to e-publish.

frossie 17y ago

I actually had to check it wasn't April 1st. Oh the irony indeed. On the plus side: 1. This might focus people's attentions on the problems of buying DRM books - I am still astonished how little it bothers people. 2. For the love of all your deities, can we please revisit copyright laws. The man has been dead for 59 years. Surely we can all agree those books should be public domain by now. Death+70 is just too long.

olefoo 17y ago
Death plus 70 is just one instance of laws being purchased by special interests; and that is a tough problem.
- derefr 17y ago
  At this point, I'd actually accept a special "Disney gets to make money from Mickey Mouse forever" law in exchange for shorter copyrights for everything else.
  - CWuestefeld 17y ago
    That's actually an interesting idea. Wouldn't it be a good experiment (and a nice comeuppance if it pans out) to see the unshackled media beat the pants off a stagnating Mickey?
    - dan_the_welder 17y ago
      Finally legal Mickey Mouse anime slash.
  - andreyf 17y ago
    There's probably a more realistic version - to put expensive-to-prove legal loop for extending copyright (but not as expensive as lobbying congress) so large corporations can take that option instead of breaking copyright for everyone. Another option would be to create a branch of IP "in between" copyright and trademark (which is indefinitely renewable). But IMNAL, so it might as well be my ass talking.
  - 10ren 17y ago
    Unfortunately, it would probably need to be "Disney gets to make money from all its copyrighted works forever". But I suspect Disney isn't actually that powerful itself, but it has sufficient resources and motivation to argue its case strongly before the appropriate committees - and then the many other powerful parties with similar interests rally round it.
- CWuestefeld 17y ago
  I agree with the intent of what you said. But I'd like to point out that the phrase "special interest" is very loaded. If you're going to use the phrase, can you differentiate between a "special interest" versus just a plain old regular interest? It seems that people use "special interest" to denote interests with which they disagree. Those entities that they agree with are overlooked, despite the fact that all entities manifestly have their own interests. (I hesitate to cite specific examples for fear of forking out an off-topic thread for an OP that's already marginal)
  - olefoo 17y ago
    It is in the nature of special interests that they will always declare themselves to be acting in the public interest. I would agree that getting too specific is best left to discussions on another site.
  - andreyf 17y ago
    I think of "special" interest as the opposite (by some imaginary scale) of "public" interest. Public interest that which costs/benefits people equally - so things done "in the public interest" will benefit the majority of people. Democratic governments are good [1] because they tend to do things which are "in the public interest". Things done "for special interests" are those done for a minority at the expense of the majority - "special" because that minority has some sort of power (lobbying) that the majority of people don't have. 1. According to utilitarianism - the idea that the moral worth of an action is determined solely by its contribution to overall utility: that is, its contribution to happiness or pleasure as summed among all people [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utilitarianism http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utilitarianism]
    - CWuestefeld 17y ago
      We are told that actions like Kelo and Didden are in the public interest -- that is, to the benefit and betterment of the entire community -- but this is clearly bunk. How can we discern which of policies being espoused are really net-beneficial to society? I claim that in all but the most obvious cases, you can't. It's a fool's errand, and thus the term "special interest" has no use but in propaganda.
umjames 17y ago
I agree about DRM on books being bad. That's what I love about Pragmatic Programmers' e-books, I can get a plain PDF that I can read on any device that can read it.
- sailormoon 17y ago
  Yeah, but the problem with that is that with PDF the page layout is really set in stone. What's appropriate for a 24" monitor may not be appropriate to read on your phone, or netbook, or what not. The best format, IMO, is plain HTML. It can come with a custom style sheet, or can be overridden to taste on the client. It can be read by anything, it can be endlessly adapted .. it's just the best overall solution, IMO.
  - scottdw 17y ago
    I know at least the clojure book (http://pragprog.com/titles/shcloj/programming-clojure http://pragprog.com/titles/shcloj/programming-clojure) is available in epub format which is essentially xhtml zipped with metadata files (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPUB http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPUB).
tdavis 17y ago
I'm astonished by how little DRM bothers people in general. The idea that I can buy something and not own it at the same time is ridiculous. It'd be like buying a car and having it taken back in 5 years. We make a distinction between "buying" and "leasing" for a reason. Except on the Internet, where everybody tries to get you to buy things and apply leasing rules to what you just bought. It's completely asinine.
- andreyf 17y ago
  It's not "leasing", either, though - unless they're indefinite-time leases for a fixed price, with the right to "withdraw" the lease for a full refund. Most leased cars are returned, I imagine. Most "DRM-bought" Kindle books are not. So while "buy" isn't the right word, neither is "lease". It's a whole different beast altogether.
  - grandalf 17y ago
    Every purchase has terms of sale and a price. Whether those terms are dictated by the counterparty or by laws and social customs is irrelevant. You can buy a car but you can't drive it 100 miles per hour. You can buy 1000 smoke detectors, but you can't harvest the radioactive isotope and make a nuclear reactor. You can buy a book on paper, but you can't re-publish it as your own work, etc.
- grandalf 17y ago
  Interesting. I'm always astonished by how much DRM does bother people. If a song costs $0.99 with DRM then it would cost more without DRM. Very simple. In most cases the DRM terms of use are acceptable to me, which is why I don't hesitate to buy DRM'ed content. Of course, many DRM implementations are highly annoying, but that is a design issue not a core issue with DRM technology.
  - tdavis 17y ago
    Why should the non-DRM version cost more? If anything, the DRM version should cost more, given all the time and work put into wrapping the item in some annoying "protection". In the vast majority of cases, DRM is only an annoyance. It doesn't stop anybody who really wants to share content from sharing it. The only things DRM does is give undue power to content sellers (like Amazon) and make content completely worthless when whatever technology is used to verify ownership stops working (or gets turned off like MSN Music, Yahoo Music...)
potatolicious 17y ago
This has turned out to be overblown, as usual. More info here: http://www.informationweek.com/news/personal_tech/drm/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=218501227 http://www.informationweek.com/news/personal_tech/drm/showAr... Somebody (third-party) decided to sell 1984 and Animal Farm on the Kindle Store without owning the copyright to it. Amazon is of course forced to take down said illegal posting. The only questionable part here is whether or not they should be allowed to delete purchased copies (with refund).
- olefoo 17y ago
  Thanks for finding that, it sounds like that story came out somewhat after the story had already blown up. The detail that it was due to a self-service publisher who did not own the copyright is crucial. It sounds like Amazon could save itself a lot of the PR grief that comes with this sort of thing by posting takedowns and C&Ds on chillingeffects.org like Google does.
  - habibur 17y ago
    Illegal or not, the purchasers bought the books from Amazon's web site, not from some Hackerz site. Amazon later discovered that the books that Amazon was itself selling were somehow illegal, which the buyers need not have to be concerned about in the first place. Then instead of informing the buyers of it's mistake, Amazon decided to delete the copies outright, without any notice and of course without any talk of refund to the buyers. That's what I understand of this situation.
    - potatolicious 17y ago
      Then you misunderstand the situation. Amazon issued notice of the deletion (though did not clarify that the books were illegal), and automatically refunded money without the customers having to ask. I think they handled it as well as anyone can handle this particular situation.
      - tdonia 17y ago
yason 17y ago
But isn't the reason to maintain copyright on this particular dead man's work to help him make a good living and thus greatly increases his ability to contribute with even more creations? Oh. Oh, wait...

Tiktaalik 17y ago

hah wow. strikes Kindle off "to buy" list

deleted 17y ago
[deleted]
Skeuomorph 17y ago
Sony Reader allows you to categorize your materials, while amazingly, Kindle doesn't have any hierarchy, just a long list. As a bonus, the Sony Reader doesn't have wireless DRM to remotely delete your books. That's not a bug, it's a feature. (I have both devices. The Sony is more usable while the Kindle DX handles full size business and engineering PDFs.)
- evilneanderthal 17y ago
  You know, I had a Sony mp3 player a while back. One day the music library software updated itself and installed DRM retroactively on the device and I could never change the music that was on it; I threw it out after I got tired of hearing the same 12 songs. Yes, 12. 64mb storage =]
  - semiquaver 17y ago
    I'm almost positive that around the time of 64MB storage, Sony was still very against MP3 and refused to support anything but ATRAC3.
- anatoly 17y ago
  You can use pdflrfwin to read full size PDFs on the Reader pretty comfortably. It can rotate the file landscape-wise, and cuts it into 2-3 chunks, smartly merging across page boundaries.
- tdoggette 17y ago
  I still don't buy things Sony makes after their contempt for customers was put on display with the rootkit business.
- 17y ago

asciilifeform 17y ago

Curiously, the full text of the book is prominently posted online in multiple places, for example: http://www.george-orwell.org/1984/index.html http://www.george-orwell.org/1984/index.html This could be because the copyright has expired almost everywhere.

tomjen 17y ago
He wrote it in 1948, which is post Mickey so it is still under copyright. Not that it matters, as you pointed out.
- xiaoma 17y ago
  It's still under copyright in the US and UK, but not in Canada, where the copyright was "only" the author's life plus 50 years. http://www.netcharles.com/orwell/info.htm http://www.netcharles.com/orwell/info.htm

Elessar 17y ago

I felt Amazon had gained respect when they released their MP3 store without DRM. They have lost it today, utterly and likely irredeemably. There is no excuse for taking back what a customer has already purchased. None. And that they did so without even asking the customer? It should be considered outright criminal.

tomjen 17y ago
My guess is that it is actually illegal.
- frossie 17y ago
  I don't know whether it is illegal. I am trying to figure out if this violates their TOS: Upon your payment of the applicable fees set by Amazon, Amazon grants you the non-exclusive right to keep a permanent copy of the applicable Digital Content and to view, use, and display such Digital Content an unlimited number of times, solely on the Device or as authorized by Amazon" Is that "or" a get-out clause? Because the first part seems to quite definitively rule out what they did.
  - req2 17y ago
    A similar case, in which a comma allowed an escape from a 5-year contract: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/article838561.ece http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/article838...
  - kschults 17y ago
    The most logical reading of the or is that you are allowed to display the content as many times as you want, and those displays may either be on the screen or in another manner that has been authorized by Amazon. That said, I'm sure their lawyers will be able to spin it as meaning that they grant you the right to keep the copy as authorized by them.
  - jmtulloss 17y ago
    Is a TOS a legally binding contract?

wmblaettler 17y ago

It would have been even more ironic if the book had been Fahrenheit 451.

macmac 17y ago

Does anybody know what happened to the owner's annotations?

Xichekolas 17y ago
Yeah wouldn't those annotations be copyrighted by the owner, and hence Amazon seizing them would constitute basis for case of appropriating someone else's work. Of course IANAL, I'm just speculating, and am 95% certain what I just said wouldn't have a leg to stand on.
- sailormoon 17y ago
  How could a user prove their annotations ever even existed?

weaksauce 17y ago

What I do not get is how amazon can be so right on the DRM issue with regards to digital music and be so backwards on the DRM of books.

blhack 17y ago
It isn't amazon, it is the publishers. Somebody commented on my blog about this the other day, and nailed it pretty well: http://www.gibsonandlily.com/comments/4043/ http://www.gibsonandlily.com/comments/4043/
- weaksauce 17y ago
  Great link! I am just surprised that amazon cannot explain this to the publishers. It would seem that they have a good deal of clout with the publishers being such an online presence. If they went the iPod route and once it gets on the device it is hard for the average person to get the data back off. That should satiate the publishers that they are not going to get easily ripped off. Of course the hackers here know to download a piece of software to transfer the songs off an iPod but 80%(not a real statistic) does not know how to do this.
  - irinotecan 17y ago
    Someone else above said the Kindle edition of 1984 was 99 cents. I'm sure the publisher is well aware of the benefits of having a kindle edition, but got greedy and demanded it be sold at a significantly higher price (or they get a much larger percentage of the gross). When Amazon balked, they took their marbles and went home.
- andreyf 17y ago
  It's not the publishers, it's copyright law. Copyright law gives the publishers certain rights. Publishers are economic entities which maximize profits. Blaming publishers for exercising legal rights which maximize profit is like blaming rocks for falling on people.
  - 17y ago

blhack 17y ago

Does anybody know if amazon actively checks the books put on your kindle via their email service? There are a number of books that I own in dead-tree format (some of them, multiple copies in dead-tree format) that they don't offer in the kindle store. This sort of move really scares me; I have been contemplating moving some of them to the kindle (I have the books in .txt format).

timf 17y ago

"Upon your payment of the applicable fees set by Amazon, Amazon grants you the non-exclusive right to keep a permanent copy of the applicable Digital Content and to view, use, and display such Digital Content an unlimited number of times, solely on the Device or as authorized by Amazon as part of the Service and solely for your personal, non-commercial use. Digital Content will be deemed licensed to you by Amazon under this Agreement unless otherwise expressly provided by Amazon." From: http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=200144530 http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=2... The last 1.5 sentences seem to nullify the rest of the paragraph for all intents and purposes...

tolmasky 17y ago
Is that really how contracts work (honest question)? You can essentially put "just kidding" at the end of a contract and everything above it is nullified? If this is the case than those portions of the contract would seem to act solely for the purposes of deception.
- lallysingh 17y ago
  Yup, just like the 'unless' keyword in Perl.
- cschneid 17y ago
  Sorta, not really. Contracts have a lot more leeway than they look like. If the judge thinks you're being abusive in the writing of a contract, they'll say "nope, sorry, you lose", or throw out that clause and keep going. IANAL, etc.

svandoren 17y ago

The book is under copyright still in America. The Orwell estate is to be blamed for this, not Amazon, except they should be trashed for not vetting, properly, a book they thought was in the public domain.

keyist 17y ago

1984 the book only tells us about a bleak future. Amazon's Kindle policies show u that future. They're just following the maxim "Show, don't tell!" Obligatory link to Stallman's Right to Read essay: http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html Deleting the books is actually one of the more benign things they can do. What is truly scary is them or others changing the content of books Ministry of Truth style, without us realizing it.

sailormoon 17y ago
Your comment goes a little too far (this is not the full realisation of 1984, not yet anyway) but you do raise a good point. It introduces the first actual working memory hole; one of the key enablers of the 1984 regime. Imagine some little guy writes a controversial tell-all book, it's published. People buy it on Kindle. The guy is sued by The Man, loses, and any unsold books are pulped - plus, now, any Kindle books are recalled, or possibly revised. We have the technology ...
- andreyf 17y ago
  And we have the legal basis, in some parts of the world (notably, China).
  - sailormoon 17y ago
    Well the worst thing is it seems like there doesn't even need to be a legal basis! Everything's under a "license", no-one owns anything. What's to stop a newspaper company retroactively editing the news? Their news? Hell the system is in place for that already. Most news syndication uses Atom or similar, that has support for "updates". We might be giving away more than we bargained for when we replace paper for mutable digitalia. We need to at least think about how we can address this systemic risk.

jknupp 17y ago

I had this on my Kindle and didn't realize it had been deleted until I read the story here. The email from Amazon is in the "Your Amazon.com Order #XXX..." format familiar to anyone who buys kindle content regularly, so many will not even realize this was removed. 1984 is literally my favorite book. I was happy to have it on my Kindle, readily available at all times. You would think, then, that I would be outraged by this. To be honest, after I got over the initial creepy "they went into MY device and deleted something" feeling, my (positive) feelings about either Amazon and the Kindle itself were unchanged. It's still an amazingly useful device that I get a ton of mileage out of, and they made a dumb mistake that just happened to affect me. I've been fully reimbursed for the title (all $0.99 of it), so no harm done. The concerns about Amazon randomly deleting content on your Kindle seem overblown. The ostensible purpose of the Kindle is to drive sales of Amazon's e-books. How would deleting customers' purchases on a frequent basis further that goal? I'm willing to write this off as a one-time occurrence, albeit an unfortunate and somewhat frustrating one.

breck 17y ago
Interesting comment. I feel like too many people are speaking up on HN just to speak (I wonder if the demographic has changed lately). I like this comment because it adds some data, not just an opinion or crafted argument. I come to HN to hear first hand accounts from people. jknupp's comment is a good example. Other great examples are when founders comment on articles about their companies, or programmers about their code, or authors about their articles. But above this comment, with 40+ upvotes, are a couple of comments where the commenter doesn't even own a kindle, nevermind having 1984. sigh.
- sailormoon 17y ago
  Huh? Does owning a Kindle give you some special insight into the question of DRM, copyright, consumer rights, etc, inaccessible to others? How would owning a Kindle make you more qualified to comment on this development? Maybe a lot of people didn't buy the Kindle because they have compelling, well-argued positions on why they don't accept the limitations imposed on you by the product's terms and conditions. If anything those people are probably more informed on the issue than someone who just bought the latest gadget. Speaking up just to speak is a problem, yes. But if you're going to impose barriers to participation, let's have them be a little less arbitrary than "owns a Kindle".

maxniederhofer 17y ago

Just underlines the market opportunity for someone who is not beholden to publishers to launch an open ereader...

socratees 17y ago

That's shocking. esp. a book such as 1984. why would they do that? Did the customer service provide any specific reasons why the book was pulled out?

gojomo 17y ago

Next week, Amazon plans a special interactive commemorative edition of Fahrenheit 451 that will trigger a battery-overload, setting your Kindle on fire and destroying its entire contents.

deleted 17y ago

[deleted]

veritgo 17y ago

Nowhere near the same level of disappointment, but it is kind of sad that an article from the NYTimes lacks any mention that they tried to contact Amazon for a comment. Even a simple 'Amazon was called but declined to comment' would have been appreciated.

sailormoon 17y ago
What could Amazon possible say to defend their actions? The facts are plain to see. Personally I could do without their lame corporate spin, anyway. edit: why the downvotes? It's a sincere comment! When Sony installed frickin' rootkits on people's computers, did anyone say "wait, wait, let's wait for their side of the story"? Of course not. "Why" doesn't matter. What matters is that it can be done, that it has been done, and it might well be done again. Nothing Amazon says changes any of that. I stand by what I said.
- andreyf 17y ago
  Um, Amazon could point out that the decision to withdraw the book was that of the publisher, and that they are legally bound to defend the rights publishers as defined under US law. Think of it this way - there are a couple of parties here. Both Amazon and most publishers are public corporations. That means they have a legal obligation to maximize shareholder value. The law allows publishers certain rights, and, in order to follow the law (maximize shareholder value), they must take advantage of those rights. Amazon, in turn, has a choice of forcing the publishers give up their rights under the law. Doing so would decrease the number of publishers that sell books. I imagine they did an economic analysis and figured that to maximize shareholder value, they must protect the publishers' legal right at the expense of common understanding of "readers' rights". So, where exactly is the problem here? Is it in people following the laws? I would say no: the problem is with the laws themselves. Which laws is an interesting question, one that is very much lacking discussion on this forum :(
jrockway 17y ago
It was a blog hosted by the Times, not an article in the Times.

rcoder 17y ago

From what I saw on the Kindle forums, the publisher of these editions (MobileReference) mostly offers $0.99 downloads of public-domain texts. There's a $10 version of 1984 still available for purchase from Amazon here: http://www.amazon.com/Nineteen-Eighty-Four/dp/B002A9JO9W http://www.amazon.com/Nineteen-Eighty-Four/dp/B002A9JO9W So, it looks to me like this was a case of a publisher illegally distributing a book to which they had no license. As an analogy, think of people who buy a bootleg DVD from a flea market while traveling overseas, only to discover it won't play in their region-locked DVD player at home. Yes, it sucks that DRM prevented them from using media they thought they had bought, but they also knew perfectly well that they were getting a deal that was just a little too good to be true.

easyfrag 17y ago
If this was indeed the case then the better solution would have been for Amazon to pay the royalties to the copyright holder on the previous sales and quietly remove the 99 cent version from the store. This is a public relations disaster for the Kindle. I disagree with your argument that people should have known this was too good to be true. Orwell has been dead for almost 60 years, 1984 will be public domain soon enough.
- grandalf 17y ago
  disaster? are you kidding? I'm a kindle user and I could care less about this news.
  - adharmad 17y ago
    Sure, but what about potential loss of sales of the kindle by more privacy conscious users? Remember the Sony rootkit debacle a few years ago? No end users were really affected by it, but it was a huge PR disaster for them. Not saying that the current case is analogous but we cannot fortell how people will react to such sneaky behavior.
- rcoder 17y ago
  That assumes that it was simply an issue of royalty payments. Publishing agreements can have many more restrictions (only authorized content, limits to which markets can be served, editorial veto, etc.) that aren't just about paying $0.20/unit. Regardless of the feasibility, I wouldn't expect Amazon to have any interest in creating a precedent of them paying to cover up for the mistakes of publishers on the Kindle store. Unlike many people, I actually think that yanking unauthorized books after download is totally reasonable, provided Amazon offers a detailed explanation of the reason.

jrockway 17y ago

This is a good thing. Nobody minds DRM when it doesn't bite them. When it starts fucking them over, they will start getting upset and stop buying intentionally crippled products. Then DRM will die. (Does DRM'd music even exist anymore?)

DannoHung 17y ago

One day, someone's gonna come out with a 8 1/2" x 11" eBook reader that doesn't look like it ran into the ugly tree at 80 mph that doesn't have any associated DRM and I am gonna buy the FUCK out of that thing.

DanielStraight 17y ago

Simple fact. If there is DRM of any kind, you do not own it. Period.

MaddHatta 17y ago

"Books simply disappeared, always during the night. Your name was removed from the kindles, every record of everything you had ever done was wiped out, your one-time existence was denied and then forgotten. You were abolished, annihilated: vaporized was the usual word."

timwiseman 17y ago

Incidentally, arstechnica has a detailed write up at http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2009/07/amazon-sold-pirated-books-raided-some-kindles.ars http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2009/07/amazon-sold-...