Interesting story by David Pogue in the NYT about e-books:
This morning, 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—thought they owned.The author in question, funnily enough, was George Orwell.
But no, 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.
Digital texts are supposed to be the next big thing in the humanities, and as such they're getting all kinds of attention and discussion, including discussion over their ontological and legal status. As things stand with the old technology, when you buy a physical book your ownership rights are present but limited. If you've got a paper copy of, say, Animal Farm, you can do anything you want with the physical object: use it, neglect it, destroy it, give it away, resell it. What you don't have ownership rights over is the text within: you can't reprint or republish it, or sell photocopies or digital scans of it.
With an e-book, though, there's no physical object, just the text -- which seems to suggest, as demonstrated here, that you don't actually have any ownership rights over the thing at all. It's not unlike the comparison between CDs and mp3s, which has been such a bone of contention between the music industry and, well, pretty much everyone else.
I'm not sure what to do about it, or how copyright law needs to change to deal with these new technologies. I just think that we've arrived at a strange and interesting pass with them.
5 Responses:
A couple of points.
First, if Amazon (or anyone else) sells you something, they no longer have an ownership interest in what they sold. They cannot "withdraw" it or "recall" it. They can steal it, like anyone else.
Even if they sell you a pile of electrons, as opposed to atoms, they have still parted with it.
This is particularly interesting to me, as I was about to get a kindle, preparatory to spending a year in a remote location.
But given the recent "disappearing" of all GLBT literature and the "withdrawing" of Orwell, I'm reverting to my natural Luddite state.
Paper, baby, paper.
I am in favor of putting copies of everything on the Internet Archive for permanent storage.
According to what else I've read on this (on the Consumerist), the company that sold the e-books didn't have the rights. So, the publisher is completely within its rights to withdraw them, and Amazon never should have sold them in the first place. (Sort of like selling stolen goods.)
But the fact that Amazon has the power to just pull e-books like this is frightening in its implications.
Thing is, as far as I know, when Amazon sells you an ebook they haven't actually sold you a thing; this is actually different from an mp3, in that an mp3 is at least, as Jim says, electrons. What they sell you when they sell you an ebook is access to a text that lives on a remote server.
So, the publisher is completely within its rights to withdraw them, and Amazon never should have sold them in the first place. (Sort of like selling stolen goods.)
Yes and the RIGHT way to fix this problem is the way that this problem would have been fixed with paper copies of the book:
* Amazon immediately stops selling the books
* The publishing company that has the right to the books drops a lawsuit on the publishing company that was selling the books through Amazon's store without having the publishing rights.
* Amazon sends its lawyers over to the company that actually owns the rights to the books and grovels, perhaps even going so far as to cut them a check for the copies that were sold before the book was pulled as a settlement.
* Amazon fixes its tech and/or workflow problem that allowed a company that didn't have publication rights to get into their system in the first place.
* Perhaps as part of the settlement with the publisher Amazon puts out a general recall notice that allows purchasers of the books to voluntarily give them back to Amazon in exchange for store credit.
Note that what's missing in all of this is Amazon sneaking into people's homes electronically and wiping the books off of their devices.
I had been thinking about getting a Kindle - one of the nice new ones that can do PDF reading natively. It would be helpful for reading research papers on the go and save a ton of paper. Now I'm going to avoid the Kindle and wait for someone else. Their terms of use were already a bit scary and the idea that they'd actually exercise them rather than just using them as a legalistic ass-covering is just too much for me to worry about.
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