A couple of days ago, the Kindle community starting buzzing about Amazon’s latest dubious move on its gadget. In a move that stunned a lot of Kindle owners, Amazon decided to remove fully-paid books from the buyers’ Kindles and refund them the money automatically. Anybody who purchased “1984″ or “Animal Farm” has probably gotten that message. Amazon has argued that the books were removed to protect the rights of the copyright holders.
These books were added to our catalog using our self-service platform by a third party who did not have the rights to the books. When we were notified of this by the rights holder, we removed the illegal copies from our systems and from customers’ devices, and refunded customers.
While it’s admiring how dedicated Amazon is to protecting the publishers’ rights, it’s simply outrageous for Amazon to exercise the power we knew it had to remove content from its customers’ Kindles without their consent. The story brings up two issues that the industry needs to be concerned about: 1. how to stop bootleg copies to make their way to Kindle (or other e-book readers). 2. how to deal with them once these bootleg copies are out there.
The piracy has been a big issue in the music and movie industries for the past few years. I have not been a fan of how RIAA and MPAA have gone about putting hefty fines on the table for folks who are caught distributing illegal copies on the Internet. But what Amazon has done goes beyond anything these two organizations have done in the past. To recall content from the customers’ Kindle without their consent is simply unacceptable. Especially if you count the fact that folks had paid for these copies.
This move sets a bad precedent for future cases. And think about all the ammunition that conspiracy theorists now have to stoke the fire. If Amazon can remove a certain book from your Kindle, it can probably monitor what you read on your device, right? I am sure Amazon is not in the business of violating anyone’s privacy, but one has to wonder where the line that shouldn’t be crossed is and whether Amazon has crossed it with its latest move.
Content piracy is a big issue and as a content publisher myself I am all for the issue being addressed in an effective fashion. What we can’t do is allowing Amazon or other companies dictate what can or can’t go on our e-book readers. If that were to happen, we may as well go back to paper books.
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One Response to “Amazon Removes Pirated Books From Kindle”
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A few thoughts on this issue
I don’t think Amazon did the right thing, but, we do need to think a little more about the implications of things going digital and what that means for our ownership of them.
What i mean by this is that our concept of how to deal with digital thing vs real life things needs to evolve so that people will naturally agree with how to handle issues like this.
People saying that it should be just like a physical book might be right, but i think that might be to simple of a view. I can do things with my ebook of 1984 i can’t easily so with my physical copy. It is clear that we as a society have not come to a consensus of how that changes our rights and responsibilities in regards to digital goods vs physical goods, and i have no idea what the right views truly should be.
With that said (if anyone is still reading this), Amazon should have given full disclosure about what happened and then upgraded everyone to a legal copy of the book.
One issue that has not been discussed is what about possible differences between the bootleg and the real thing? Now that would truly be Orwellian, but points to a bigger issue of trust with digital copies of books. We already know that Amazon can actually change the text of the books without telling us. This is so the publisher can make edits such as correcting spelling/grammar issues, or if the author decides to change something.
This is guess gets back to my original point of rights and responsibilities in a era of digital goods.
I think the kindle community needs to have a long discussion on this and force Amazon to explicitly state what they will and won’t do in a way that everyone know. A Kindle bill of rights so that everyone has a very clear idea of what can and can’t happen. This needs to be much more clear then the Terms of Service legalese they currently have.