Why Amazon is within its rights to remove access to your Kindle books
Summary: Apple, Amazon and Barnes & Noble can revoke access to your ebooks, music and software any time they want. Here's why.
Credit: PrescotteThere has been a fair amount of indignation directed towards Amazon over the last couple of days.
Amazon deleted Norwegian IT Consultant Linn Nygaard’s Amazon account and removed access to the Kindle books she had purchased.
Martin Bekkelund blogged how Amazon closed her account and wiped her Kindle. It offered no explanation as to why it had done so.
Although it smacks of poor customer service, Amazon is completely within its rights to do this. Its terms of service state:
All content included in or made available through any Amazon Service, such as text, graphics, logos, button icons, images, audio clips, digital downloads, and data compilations is the property of Amazon or its content suppliers and protected by United States and international copyright laws.
All the books on your Kindle are not yours. They belong to Amazon. All that cash you have paid was simply to access these books on your Kindle. You have not paid to own the books. If you want to own books, pay for physical printed books and get Amazon to send them to you by post.
Other online providers have similar terms and conditions.
Barnes & Noble “reserves the right to modify or discontinue the offering of any Digital Content at any time”. Apple’s terms and conditions state that “You acknowledge that iTunes is selling you a license to use the content made available through the iBookstore”
Non of these terms state that you actually own the content at all. In each case the content remains the property of the supplier.
Providers like Amazon, Apple and Barnes & Noble have structured their licences like this to protect themselves. If there is a catastrophic site failure that makes access to your books impossible, then you could sue for the return of your property. They would be liable.
Granting a licence to use the books or use the software makes sense. These terms are to protect their investment in their site infrastructure and costs to maintain the site.
To try and protect your investment on Kindle and Nook, you can try to remove the DRM from the book. Removing the DRM from the book puts you in contravention of terms and conditions and you then run the risk of having your account suspended. But you will have access to the books.
Digital Rights Management is a huge issue for publishers and authors. I totally get DRM, the need to limit access to digital content after purchase and I get the need to protect copyright.
I am a published author and I am delighted that I receive royalties for the books I’ve written that have been legitimately purchased. Why should the book that I spent months researching and writing, formatting and editing be available for free or downloaded on torrent sites?
With the imminent demise of the printed book, we are going to have to get used to the way we purchase but do not own electronic goods. Whether that is virtual clothing for my Second Life avatar, a customised background image on Twitter or a premium account on LinkedIn, it is not really mine.
I am renting the service just like I am renting the books I ‘buy’ on Amazon. And like any other service I rent, it can be taken away from me on a whim.
I just have to get used to that thought.
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Talkback
"buying" - not rental or loan - is that part of what fools us consumers?
Another issue that probably weighs in here is that a private customer cannot be expected to read a complex contract to rent something simple. In those cases at least Danish law, and I would believe Norwegian law too, protects the consumer which potentially spells trouble for sellers. Yes, those law variations and general consumer protection is probably also why roll-out of many "gloabl" (typically US based) services is so slow - selling here requires a different approach to terms and conditions and maybe even what you call things and how they are sold.
costs more?
But then people may be less willing to pay for the 'rental' when thy could buy it properly.
If it is only renting then why does it, in many cases, cost more than actually buying the item?
I switched back for that reason
I'll continue to buy books and cds (and rip them to mp3 "backup copy") until they fix that BS.
BUY eANYTHING?
No more eCRAP for me...
DRM'd or not
iTunes music hasn't been DRM'd for years now. Of course if you don't have a real computer and only a device, it's hard to get to the physical files. But iTunes was always designed so you could back up your tunes without DRM'd.
If you buy it you own it. Period. Granted they are doing their best to confuse the issue. And you shouldn't be putting stuff you bought out on any torrent site. But if I want to give a copy of a book I read to my sister when I'm done I will. Especially given I spent more for it than the hardcopy that I could have resold.
Just cause the media format is different doesn't mean a concept that has existed for hundreds if not thousands of years is different. If you buy something, it's yours. The problem is that people haven't put up enough of a fight and the companies will try to get away with whatever they can get away with.
fair use
iTunes songs have NO DRM.
yes, costs more
Hear this AMAZON!!!!!
Amazon you have a broken model. Please fix it.
DRM
Buy it, strip the DRM, and use what you BOUGHT on ANY dang device.
I'll never play this game
Funny that, the button says Buy :-|
Buy is the right word
Re: But what you buy is a license to use the book, not the book itself.
Just because they say so, doesn't mean they're right.
When you buy a physical book, you are still merely purchasing a personal use license. Those works are still copyright, in spite of the fact that they're sitting on your shelf. The content of those books is not yours to do with as you please.
When you purchase a book, you're purchasing the right, from the publisher, to READ it, and to read it WHEN, WHERE, and, until recently, HOW you please. Consumers expect the same deal when they purchase a book from a digital distributor. The fact that Apple's, Amazon's, and Barns & Nobel's EULAs spell out something different from the spirit of the agreement that consumers believe they're entering into does not mean that the digital distributors are right to cut you off from your bought-and-paid-for licenses, nor does it mean that have the right to do so. Just because it's spelled out in black and white does not mean it's fair and valid.
That's something for a judge to decide, once one (or all) of the digital distributors cuts off someone who is willing to challenge these agreements in courts of law.
Digital Judge
If the EULA or Acceptable Use policy is legal, it becomes a binding contract between the user and the provider. Not reading, or agreeing to the terms doesn't change the fact that you REALLY agreed to the terms by using them.
If you don't like the terms, go somewhere else. If the terms start to impact the profitability of the provider, they will change them.
Which is what needs to be asked
The bigger issue in my mind, however, is that on the surface, these distributors have fashioned themselves after the already existing publishing industry. The use words like "buy" and "purchase" in their actual interfaces. Moreover, they're treating these use or license agreements as if there is no analogous legislation or case law in the "real world" market.
I'm no lawyer, and I'm not going to pretend to be anything like one, but that just seems very fishy to me. Books are not some sort of brave new world just because they're printed on a screen instead of a sheet of paper. In both cases, you're buying a personal license for the content. It seems very much to me that the EULAs and AUPs at play here are trying to buy these ePublishers greater rights than paper publishers have, when there's really no justification for it.
I honestly don't see how Amazon or anyone else should be able to deny me access to products I've purchased from them if Penguin or TOR can't walk into my house and start torching my book case.
I question whether these agreements ebook "buyers" are forced into are actually legal or not.
Close, but you still haven't quite got it
Which sort of makes this article moot ...
One key thing to note (quoted from the Amazon agreement): Termination. Your rights under this Agreement will automatically terminate if you fail to comply with any term of this Agreement.
Also: Your Conduct. You may use the wireless connectivity provided by us only in connection with the Service as permitted by this Agreement. You may not use the wireless connectivity for any other purpose.
I inferred from this "Your Conduct" term that if you use the wireless connectivity for anything other than downloading contect from Amazon that you are in violation of the terms of the agreement hence Amazon is within their rights to terminate. It is general BS terms like this (BS in the sense that they do not explicitly state what the Service is so that the user knows under what conditions they would violate, i.e. "any other purpose") that cause headaches for the user and give a high level of control to the vendor (Amazon).
it is fair