blog/data/2012-10-22-amazon-steal.txt

   1 Title: Amazon steal books from customer and throw out her out without any explanation
   2 Tags: english, opphavsrett, personvern
   3 Date: 2012-10-22 20:30
   4
   5 <p>A blog post from Martin Bekkelund today tell the story of
   6 <a href="http://www.bekkelund.net/2012/10/22/outlawed-by-amazon-drm/">how
   7 Amazon erased the books from a customer's kindle, locked the account
   8 and refuse to tell the customer why</a>.  If a real book store did
   9 this to a customer, it would be called breaking into private property
  10 and theft.  The story has spread around the net today.  A bit more
  11 background information is available in Norwegian from
  12 <a href="http://www.digi.no/904658/hun-ble-kastet-ut-av-amazon">digi.no</a>.
  13 It is no surprise that digital restriction mechanisms (DRM) are used
  14 this way, as it has been warned about such abuse since DRM was
  15 introduced many years back.  And Amazon proved in 2009 that it was
  16 willing to
  17 <a href="http://boingboing.net/2009/07/20/amazons-orwellian-de.html">
  18 break into customers equipment and remove the books</a> people had
  19 bought, when it removed the book 1984 by George Orwell from all the
  20 customers who had bought it.  From the official comments, it even
  21 sounded like
  22 <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/18/technology/companies/18amazon.html">Amazon
  23 would never do that again</a>.  And here we are, three years
  24 later.</p>
  25
  26 <p>And thought this action is
  27 <a href="http://www.itavisen.no/904648/forbrukerraadet-helt-haarreisende">against
  28 Norwegian regulations and law</a>, it is according to the terms of use
  29 as written by Amazon, and it is hard to hold Amazon accountable to
  30 Norwegian laws.  It is just yet another example of unacceptable terms
  31 of use on the web, and how they are used to remove customer
  32 rights.</p>
  33
  34 <p>Luckily for electronic books, there are alternatives without
  35 unacceptable terms.  For example
  36 <a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/">Project Gutenberg</a> (about 40,000
  37 books), <a href="http://runeberg.org/">Project Runenberg</a> (1,652
  38 books) and <a href="http://www.archive.org/details/texts">The Internet
  39 Archive</a> (3,641,797 books) have heaps of books without DRM, which
  40 can read by anyone and shared with anyone.</p>
  41
  42 <p>Update 2012-10-23: This story broke in the morning on Monday. In
  43 the evening after the story had spread all across the Internet, Amazon
  44 restored the account of the user, as reported by
  45 <a href="http://www.digi.no/904675/helomvending-fra-amazon">digi.no</a>
  46 and <a href="http://nrk.no/kultur-og-underholdning/1.8368487">NRK</a>.
  47 Apparently public pressure work.  The story from Martin have seen
  48 several twitter messages per minute the last 24 hours, which is quite
  49 a lot, and is still drawing a lot of attention.  But even when the
  50 account is restored, the fundamental problem still exist.  I recommend
  51 reading two opinions from
  52 <a href="http://blogs.computerworlduk.com/simon-says/2012/10/rights-you-have-no-right-to-your-ebooks/index.htm">Simon
  53 Phipps</a> and
  54 <a href="http://blogs.computerworlduk.com/open-enterprise/2012/10/is-amazon-playing-fair/index.htm">Glen
  55 Moody</a> if you want to learn more about the fundamentals and more
  56 details about the original story.</p>