6 ms·

Student sues Amazon after Kindle eats his homework

42 points by pmikal 17y ago

e40 17y ago
I didn't realize that kindle users could make notes on books. That makes what amazon did even more egregious.
jacquesm 17y ago
Proof that children should not be able to bring suit until they are of age. Losing your homework is not reason for a lawsuit, if you get a device like the kindle you should learn how to make backups. And if your chosen device for your homework can not make backups you only have yourself to blame, you should use something else. Personal responsibility seems to be in short supply, blame somebody else is so much easier. Electronics can fail, the kindle is no exception. If you made your homework on a piece of paper I'm sure it would not be lost so easily, but then again pieces of paper can blow away, burn, get lost and so on. The kindle - and any other piece of complex tech - is not infallible. At that price point it can't be expected to be infallible. The fact that amazon initiated the failure is a systemic issue with the kindle, nothing to be surprised about. If you choose a medium with all kinds of weird DRM then you can't really blame the vendor. Is it frivolous lawsuit week or did I miss the memo ? First that real estate company over a tweet and now this. Personally I think amazon deserves a boycott for the kindles DRM but you can't really sue them over a 'feature' that has been well advertised. The kindle is broken by design.
- sound2man 17y ago
  I don't think that this is an issue of not backing up. The student bought what he supposed to be a legit copy of a book, than amazon remotely deleted it, along with his notes. There should be a mechanism to backup notes, separate from the book associated with them, but i don't believe there is one. Correct me if I'm wrong.
  - jacquesm 17y ago
    Whether there is or is not is not really the problem here, if there is he should have used it, if there isn't he shouldn't be using the kindle for any note taking of stuff that he thinks is important enough to sue over. The kindles DRM is not exactly news, personally I would never ever buy a device that allows some company far away decide whether or not I can read something that I already have, no matter how I got it. It's absolutely horrible. But the fault in this case lies clearly with the student, not with amazon.
    - sound2man 17y ago
      True on the backup front, but I must admit that I probably wouldn't have thought about that. As to the DRM on Kindle, it has bee known, but I don't think their ability and willingness to delete a "legitimately" purchased book remotely has been until this incident. Isn't this the first time that a book has been deleted over the air?
      - jacquesm 17y ago
        It was. Of course then nobody thought it was important enough to raise a racket over. Apple does the same thing with their 'kill switch' on the applications in the app store. These are the most public examples of how we are changing from 'sale' to 'lease' of everything with which that is technically possible. Jeff Bezos and Steve Jobs should take a public stand against this instead of being handmaidens to the new world order. They ought to be very much ashamed of themselves.
    - anigbrowl 17y ago
      I feel the same way, but this is a tip-of-the-iceberg issue. what happens if you're working the cloud and MegaCorp zaps your thesis/subscriber database/whatever? Yeah, one should back up but part of the idea of cloud computing is you pay for availability and security. It may be a frivolous lawsuit, but it's probably going to be an important test case unless Amazon settles.
      - 17y ago
- pmichaud 17y ago
  This is like saying that someone who takes notes on paper, then subsequently loses those notes when the paper manufacturer steals the paper back, is to blame for losing the notes because they didn't take a photo copy. It's a total cop-out.
  - andreyf 17y ago
    This is like saying that [...] the paper manufacturer steals the paper back No, it's really nothing like that. Semantics aside, intellectual property is not like physical property: it's not subject to the laws physical property is subject to, nor to the right of physical property.
    - naz 17y ago
      It was Amazon who made it like physical property by applying all the DRM in the first place.
      - jacquesm 17y ago
        DRM and physical properties are not applicable to the same objects. DRM refers to data+software to unlock that data. A physical device could be the carrier of a DRM'd piece of data but it has nothing to do with the carrier itself. Data is just streams of bits no matter what carrier they're on. That data could be encumbered with DRM or it could be 'plain'. You never 'own' a piece of DRM'd data, these are almost exclusively limited use sublicenses. It's not like buying a book or a record (the vinyl kind). It's more like buying a movie ticket.
    - ekiru 17y ago
      You're absolutely right. A better comparison would be if you bought a computer from Apple and were using iWork to write some notes, and then Apple decided to delete the notes you had been writing without your permission and without warning. Regardless of the legality of deleting the 1984 ebook, it's ridiculous to assert that Amazon should be able to destroy anyone's annotations for any reason. Those annotations belong to the user who created them. I don't really understand what you mean when you say "semantics aside". Are you intentionally saying something that is equivalent to "Ignoring the meaning of 'intellectual property' and 'physical property', intellectual property is not like physical property?" I assume not, but I'm not sure what you meant to say there.
- kyro 17y ago
  You know, that kind of attitude really really irritates me. It's a "don't trust anyone/anything" type of mentality that leads to a lot of unnecessary paranoia. We live in a society of trust. I buy a DVD, trusting the company has given me a disc with the movie I want, viewable for years and years, but if it suddenly executes some sort of self-destruct code, I am at fault for not making copies? You might say it's wrong on the consumer's behalf in putting that much trust in a company, but that's the society we've come to live in, and, not including the small percentage of issues like these that occur, I think it's safe to say the trust we give has spared us a lot of worry.
  - jacquesm 17y ago
    So, you're saying that you do not backup your work ? Making backups is one of the first things you learn about when you start using digital media. When you're 17 and you think you are old and wise enough to bring suit to a large corporation you are also old and wise enough to copy your important data. It's funny how I get modded into the ground for an obvious observation like that, if something is important to you you make sure that you have a copy in case the original gets lost. * I do not think amazon should have this right * But the kindle has this facility and you can vote against it by not buying one. Amazon has lost every bit of respect they ever earned from me because of what the kindle can do, it's a total travesty of everything an e-book should stand for, what's bought stays bought. An e-book should strive to be a BETTER book, not a worse one. Their DRM and books-on-an-elastic band should get them vilified in every medium. Personally I will never order another book from them - and believe me I've been a good customer of theirs. But losing your homework because you haven't made a copy of your notes is not a ground for a lawsuit. We call that a learning experience. I'm sure everybody on this forum has lost some digital medium or other in the past and learned the hard way that backing up your data is a must.
- daleharvey 17y ago
  I dont really understand your point, just because someone can fall over and break their nose doesnt mean I should not get in trouble for punching them in the face. They arent being sued because the device randomly malfunctioned, its because they intentionally deleted users data, remotely. While you call that a well advertised feature, I missed it on any of the promotional material or adverts.
- erlanger 17y ago
  > Losing your homework is not reason for a lawsuit, Why the hell not? Work is work, no matter your age, and clearly homework has value (artificial, but I digress) given the importance teachers have tied to it.
  - padmanabhan01 17y ago
    what if one of his class mate had thrown away his homework notebook. Would he be still be able to sue the other kid? Courts aren't setup to deal with this kind of issues.
    - shabda 17y ago
      Shouldn't Amazon be held to a heigher standard than a High scool kid?
    - StrawberryFrog 17y ago
      Able, yes. Wise, no. The wisdom of the action may be changed by the way that it's a large and respected market-leading company potentially throwing away lots of kids homework.
    - zngtk4 17y ago
      >what if one of his class mate had thrown away his homework notebook. Would he be still be able to sue the other kid? Courts aren't setup to deal with this kind of issues. He actually would still be able to sue the other kid. However, his damages would likely be rather small, and thus he would go to small claims court, which is setup to deal with this kind of issue. Probably he could also make a criminal complaint against the other kid if he really wanted.
conorgil145 17y ago
The fact that he is suing over his lost homework is almost totally irrelevant. It is just a brilliant way to hold Amazon responsible for their actions. Once a book is purchased he owns the rights to that material and he did not initiate or consent to the removal of the book. If you read the PDF draft of the lawsuit it clearly says that Amazon does not tell users in the Terms & Agreements that they have the ability to remotely delete e-books and in fact says that "...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..." Amazon should never be allowed to change data on an individual's kindle without their express written consent. Its criminal.
- andreyf 17y ago
  Once a book is purchased [the customer] owns the rights to that material [indefinitely] According to most people's common sense, maybe, but certainly not according to US copyright law. Copyright law is very clear about under what what terms authors may license their work, and licensing it for indefinite time is not a requirement. Edit: I'm just stating facts, not saying it's right. Personally, I see both sides. But if one argues that copyright law should be changed, I don't see why Amazon, a public corporation, should take away rights from publishers which have granted to them by the laws passed in a government supposedly representing the will of the people.
  - _pi 17y ago
    US laws on ownership are retarded. You know you live in a screwed up country when you can sell everything above the ground and below the air(gov't territory) to one buyer and everything below the ground to another.
    - andreyf 17y ago
      Well, "owership" is very different from "licensed intellectual works". The similarity between "intellectual property" and "property" is purely semantic and without legal basis.
  - 17y ago
billswift 17y ago
According to the Wall Street Journal article (http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2009/07/30/lawsuit-amazon-ate-my-homework/ http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2009/07/30/lawsuit-amazon-ate-my...) about the suit, he did not lose the notes; he is upset because the notes are no longer linked (or whatever) to the text they refer to. >>Amazon didn’t delete the file containing Gawronski’s notes on the Kindle device. But since the book text "no longer exists, all my notes refer back to nothing," he said. "I can’t really use it for much."<< Also, they are supposedly suing to prevent Amazon from doing this again, which Amazon has already said they will not. This is just a sleazeball lawyer going for his own benefit and a teenager trying to stretchout his 15 minutes of fame.
jamesbritt 17y ago
More information at http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2009/07/30/lawsuit-amazon-ate-my-homework/ http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2009/07/30/lawsuit-amazon-ate-my...

42 points by pmikal 17y ago

e40 17y ago

I didn't realize that kindle users could make notes on books. That makes what amazon did even more egregious.

Proof that children should not be able to bring suit until they are of age. Losing your homework is not reason for a lawsuit, if you get a device like the kindle you should learn how to make backups. And if your chosen device for your homework can not make backups you only have yourself to blame, you should use something else. Personal responsibility seems to be in short supply, blame somebody else is so much easier. Electronics can fail, the kindle is no exception. If you made your homework on a piece of paper I'm sure it would not be lost so easily, but then again pieces of paper can blow away, burn, get lost and so on. The kindle - and any other piece of complex tech - is not infallible. At that price point it can't be expected to be infallible. The fact that amazon initiated the failure is a systemic issue with the kindle, nothing to be surprised about. If you choose a medium with all kinds of weird DRM then you can't really blame the vendor. Is it frivolous lawsuit week or did I miss the memo ? First that real estate company over a tweet and now this. Personally I think amazon deserves a boycott for the kindles DRM but you can't really sue them over a 'feature' that has been well advertised. The kindle is broken by design.

sound2man 17y ago
I don't think that this is an issue of not backing up. The student bought what he supposed to be a legit copy of a book, than amazon remotely deleted it, along with his notes. There should be a mechanism to backup notes, separate from the book associated with them, but i don't believe there is one. Correct me if I'm wrong.
- jacquesm 17y ago
  Whether there is or is not is not really the problem here, if there is he should have used it, if there isn't he shouldn't be using the kindle for any note taking of stuff that he thinks is important enough to sue over. The kindles DRM is not exactly news, personally I would never ever buy a device that allows some company far away decide whether or not I can read something that I already have, no matter how I got it. It's absolutely horrible. But the fault in this case lies clearly with the student, not with amazon.
  - sound2man 17y ago
    True on the backup front, but I must admit that I probably wouldn't have thought about that. As to the DRM on Kindle, it has bee known, but I don't think their ability and willingness to delete a "legitimately" purchased book remotely has been until this incident. Isn't this the first time that a book has been deleted over the air?
    - jacquesm 17y ago
      It was. Of course then nobody thought it was important enough to raise a racket over. Apple does the same thing with their 'kill switch' on the applications in the app store. These are the most public examples of how we are changing from 'sale' to 'lease' of everything with which that is technically possible. Jeff Bezos and Steve Jobs should take a public stand against this instead of being handmaidens to the new world order. They ought to be very much ashamed of themselves.
  - anigbrowl 17y ago
    I feel the same way, but this is a tip-of-the-iceberg issue. what happens if you're working the cloud and MegaCorp zaps your thesis/subscriber database/whatever? Yeah, one should back up but part of the idea of cloud computing is you pay for availability and security. It may be a frivolous lawsuit, but it's probably going to be an important test case unless Amazon settles.
    - 17y ago
pmichaud 17y ago
This is like saying that someone who takes notes on paper, then subsequently loses those notes when the paper manufacturer steals the paper back, is to blame for losing the notes because they didn't take a photo copy. It's a total cop-out.
- andreyf 17y ago
  This is like saying that [...] the paper manufacturer steals the paper back No, it's really nothing like that. Semantics aside, intellectual property is not like physical property: it's not subject to the laws physical property is subject to, nor to the right of physical property.
  - naz 17y ago
    It was Amazon who made it like physical property by applying all the DRM in the first place.
    - jacquesm 17y ago
      DRM and physical properties are not applicable to the same objects. DRM refers to data+software to unlock that data. A physical device could be the carrier of a DRM'd piece of data but it has nothing to do with the carrier itself. Data is just streams of bits no matter what carrier they're on. That data could be encumbered with DRM or it could be 'plain'. You never 'own' a piece of DRM'd data, these are almost exclusively limited use sublicenses. It's not like buying a book or a record (the vinyl kind). It's more like buying a movie ticket.
  - ekiru 17y ago
    You're absolutely right. A better comparison would be if you bought a computer from Apple and were using iWork to write some notes, and then Apple decided to delete the notes you had been writing without your permission and without warning. Regardless of the legality of deleting the 1984 ebook, it's ridiculous to assert that Amazon should be able to destroy anyone's annotations for any reason. Those annotations belong to the user who created them. I don't really understand what you mean when you say "semantics aside". Are you intentionally saying something that is equivalent to "Ignoring the meaning of 'intellectual property' and 'physical property', intellectual property is not like physical property?" I assume not, but I'm not sure what you meant to say there.
kyro 17y ago
You know, that kind of attitude really really irritates me. It's a "don't trust anyone/anything" type of mentality that leads to a lot of unnecessary paranoia. We live in a society of trust. I buy a DVD, trusting the company has given me a disc with the movie I want, viewable for years and years, but if it suddenly executes some sort of self-destruct code, I am at fault for not making copies? You might say it's wrong on the consumer's behalf in putting that much trust in a company, but that's the society we've come to live in, and, not including the small percentage of issues like these that occur, I think it's safe to say the trust we give has spared us a lot of worry.
- jacquesm 17y ago
  So, you're saying that you do not backup your work ? Making backups is one of the first things you learn about when you start using digital media. When you're 17 and you think you are old and wise enough to bring suit to a large corporation you are also old and wise enough to copy your important data. It's funny how I get modded into the ground for an obvious observation like that, if something is important to you you make sure that you have a copy in case the original gets lost. * I do not think amazon should have this right * But the kindle has this facility and you can vote against it by not buying one. Amazon has lost every bit of respect they ever earned from me because of what the kindle can do, it's a total travesty of everything an e-book should stand for, what's bought stays bought. An e-book should strive to be a BETTER book, not a worse one. Their DRM and books-on-an-elastic band should get them vilified in every medium. Personally I will never order another book from them - and believe me I've been a good customer of theirs. But losing your homework because you haven't made a copy of your notes is not a ground for a lawsuit. We call that a learning experience. I'm sure everybody on this forum has lost some digital medium or other in the past and learned the hard way that backing up your data is a must.
daleharvey 17y ago
I dont really understand your point, just because someone can fall over and break their nose doesnt mean I should not get in trouble for punching them in the face. They arent being sued because the device randomly malfunctioned, its because they intentionally deleted users data, remotely. While you call that a well advertised feature, I missed it on any of the promotional material or adverts.
erlanger 17y ago
> Losing your homework is not reason for a lawsuit, Why the hell not? Work is work, no matter your age, and clearly homework has value (artificial, but I digress) given the importance teachers have tied to it.
- padmanabhan01 17y ago
  what if one of his class mate had thrown away his homework notebook. Would he be still be able to sue the other kid? Courts aren't setup to deal with this kind of issues.
  - shabda 17y ago
    Shouldn't Amazon be held to a heigher standard than a High scool kid?
  - StrawberryFrog 17y ago
    Able, yes. Wise, no. The wisdom of the action may be changed by the way that it's a large and respected market-leading company potentially throwing away lots of kids homework.
  - zngtk4 17y ago
    >what if one of his class mate had thrown away his homework notebook. Would he be still be able to sue the other kid? Courts aren't setup to deal with this kind of issues. He actually would still be able to sue the other kid. However, his damages would likely be rather small, and thus he would go to small claims court, which is setup to deal with this kind of issue. Probably he could also make a criminal complaint against the other kid if he really wanted.

conorgil145 17y ago

The fact that he is suing over his lost homework is almost totally irrelevant. It is just a brilliant way to hold Amazon responsible for their actions. Once a book is purchased he owns the rights to that material and he did not initiate or consent to the removal of the book. If you read the PDF draft of the lawsuit it clearly says that Amazon does not tell users in the Terms & Agreements that they have the ability to remotely delete e-books and in fact says that "...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..." Amazon should never be allowed to change data on an individual's kindle without their express written consent. Its criminal.

andreyf 17y ago
Once a book is purchased [the customer] owns the rights to that material [indefinitely] According to most people's common sense, maybe, but certainly not according to US copyright law. Copyright law is very clear about under what what terms authors may license their work, and licensing it for indefinite time is not a requirement. Edit: I'm just stating facts, not saying it's right. Personally, I see both sides. But if one argues that copyright law should be changed, I don't see why Amazon, a public corporation, should take away rights from publishers which have granted to them by the laws passed in a government supposedly representing the will of the people.
- _pi 17y ago
  US laws on ownership are retarded. You know you live in a screwed up country when you can sell everything above the ground and below the air(gov't territory) to one buyer and everything below the ground to another.
  - andreyf 17y ago
    Well, "owership" is very different from "licensed intellectual works". The similarity between "intellectual property" and "property" is purely semantic and without legal basis.
- 17y ago

billswift 17y ago

According to the Wall Street Journal article (http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2009/07/30/lawsuit-amazon-ate-my-homework/ http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2009/07/30/lawsuit-amazon-ate-my...) about the suit, he did not lose the notes; he is upset because the notes are no longer linked (or whatever) to the text they refer to. >>Amazon didn’t delete the file containing Gawronski’s notes on the Kindle device. But since the book text "no longer exists, all my notes refer back to nothing," he said. "I can’t really use it for much."<< Also, they are supposedly suing to prevent Amazon from doing this again, which Amazon has already said they will not. This is just a sleazeball lawyer going for his own benefit and a teenager trying to stretchout his 15 minutes of fame.

jamesbritt 17y ago

More information at http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2009/07/30/lawsuit-amazon-ate-my-homework/ http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2009/07/30/lawsuit-amazon-ate-my...