A blog post from Martin Bekkelund today tell the story of +how +Amazon erased the books from a customer's kindle, locked the account +and refuse to tell the customer why. If a real book store did +this to a customer, it would be called breaking into private property +and theft. The story has spread around the net today. A bit more +background information is available in Norwegian from +digi.no. +It is no surprise that digital restriction mechanisms (DRM) are used +this way, as it has been warned about such abuse since DRM was +introduced many years back. And Amazon proved in 2009 that it was +willing to + +break into customers equipment and remove the books people had +bought, when it removed the book 1984 from all the customers who had +bought it. From the official comments, it even sounded like +Amazon +would never do that again. And here we are, three years +later.
+ +And thought this action is +against +Norwegian regulations and law, it is according to the terms of use +as written by Amazon, and it is hard to hold Amazon accountable to +Norwegian laws. It is just yet another example of unacceptable terms +of use on the web, and how they are used to remove customer +rights.
+ +Luckily for electronic books, there are alternatives without +unacceptable terms. For example +Project Gutenberg (about 40,000 +books), Project Runenberg (1,652 +books) and The Internet +Archive (3,641,797 books) have heaps of books without DRM, which +can read by anyone and shared with anyone.
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