Amazon kindle
Hundreds of Amazon Kindle owners awoke to discover that books by a certain famous author had mysteriously disappeared from their e-book readers. These were books that they had bought and paid for.
Amazon mailed a few hundred owners of its Kindle reading device to explain that it had deleted electronic copies of the George Orwell's "Animal Farm" and "1984" and had "This is precisely the functional...equivalent of Barnes & Noble or Amazon itself for that matter using a crowbar or lock pick to break into your home or business, then stealing back a previous physical book purchase, replacing it with the equivalent value in cash," said privacy advocate Lauren Weinstein in an e-mail message posted to the Interesting People mailing list.
Apparently the publisher changed its mind about offering an...electronic edition, and apparently Amazon, whose business lives and dies by publisher happiness, caved. It electronically deleted all books by this author from people’s Kindles and credited their accounts for the price.
This is ugly for all kinds of reasons. Amazon says that this sort of thing is “rare,” but that it can happen at all is unsettling; we’ve been taught to believe that e-books...are, you know, just like books, only better. Already, we’ve learned that they’re not really like books, in that once we’re finished reading them, we can’t resell or even donate them. But now we learn that all sales may not even be final.
Since the copyright to these books has expired in Canada, Australia and Russia. Therefore anyone in Canada can consider these books to be in the public...domain, and any vendor in Canada can treat them as Public Domain. They do not need permission from the rights holder in the U.S. to sell these books! The same applies in other countries around the world. Amazon seems to have forgotten that U.S. copyright law applies only in the U.S. Granted that the vendor, if in the U.S., did need permission to sell the book and reward the rights holder, but if...in Canada, Australia, Russia or a number of other nations, that is NOT required.
Amazon mailed a few hundred owners of its Kindle reading device to explain that it had deleted electronic copies of the George Orwell's "Animal Farm" and "1984" and had "This is precisely the functional...equivalent of Barnes & Noble or Amazon itself for that matter using a crowbar or lock pick to break into your home or business, then stealing back a previous physical book purchase, replacing it with the equivalent value in cash," said privacy advocate Lauren Weinstein in an e-mail message posted to the Interesting People mailing list.
Apparently the publisher changed its mind about offering an...electronic edition, and apparently Amazon, whose business lives and dies by publisher happiness, caved. It electronically deleted all books by this author from people’s Kindles and credited their accounts for the price.
This is ugly for all kinds of reasons. Amazon says that this sort of thing is “rare,” but that it can happen at all is unsettling; we’ve been taught to believe that e-books...are, you know, just like books, only better. Already, we’ve learned that they’re not really like books, in that once we’re finished reading them, we can’t resell or even donate them. But now we learn that all sales may not even be final.
Since the copyright to these books has expired in Canada, Australia and Russia. Therefore anyone in Canada can consider these books to be in the public...domain, and any vendor in Canada can treat them as Public Domain. They do not need permission from the rights holder in the U.S. to sell these books! The same applies in other countries around the world. Amazon seems to have forgotten that U.S. copyright law applies only in the U.S. Granted that the vendor, if in the U.S., did need permission to sell the book and reward the rights holder, but if...in Canada, Australia, Russia or a number of other nations, that is NOT required.
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