- <item>
- <title>Amazon steal books from customer and throw out her out without any explanation</title>
- <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Amazon_steal_books_from_customer_and_throw_out_her_out_without_any_explanation.html</link>
- <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Amazon_steal_books_from_customer_and_throw_out_her_out_without_any_explanation.html</guid>
- <pubDate>Mon, 22 Oct 2012 20:30:00 +0200</pubDate>
- <description><p>A blog post from Martin Bekkelund today tell the story of
-<a href="http://www.bekkelund.net/2012/10/22/outlawed-by-amazon-drm/">how
-Amazon erased the books from a customer's kindle, locked the account
-and refuse to tell the customer why</a>. 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
-<a href="http://www.digi.no/904658/hun-ble-kastet-ut-av-amazon">digi.no</a>.
-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
-<a href="http://boingboing.net/2009/07/20/amazons-orwellian-de.html">
-break into customers equipment and remove the books</a> people had
-bought, when it removed the book 1984 by George Orwell from all the
-customers who had bought it. From the official comments, it even
-sounded like
-<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/18/technology/companies/18amazon.html">Amazon
-would never do that again</a>. And here we are, three years
-later.</p>
-
-<p>And thought this action is
-<a href="http://www.itavisen.no/904648/forbrukerraadet-helt-haarreisende">against
-Norwegian regulations and law</a>, 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.</p>
-
-<p>Luckily for electronic books, there are alternatives without
-unacceptable terms. For example
-<a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/">Project Gutenberg</a> (about 40,000
-books), <a href="http://runeberg.org/">Project Runenberg</a> (1,652
-books) and <a href="http://www.archive.org/details/texts">The Internet
-Archive</a> (3,641,797 books) have heaps of books without DRM, which
-can read by anyone and shared with anyone.</p>
-
-<p>Update 2012-10-23: This story broke in the morning on Monday. In
-the evening after the story had spread all across the Internet, Amazon
-restored the account of the user, as reported by
-<a href="http://www.digi.no/904675/helomvending-fra-amazon">digi.no</a>
-and <a href="http://nrk.no/kultur-og-underholdning/1.8368487">NRK</a>.
-Apparently public pressure work. The story from Martin have seen
-several twitter messages per minute the last 24 hours, which is quite
-a lot, and is still drawing a lot of attention. But even when the
-account is restored, the fundamental problem still exist. I recommend
-reading two opinions from
-<a href="http://blogs.computerworlduk.com/simon-says/2012/10/rights-you-have-no-right-to-your-ebooks/index.htm">Simon
-Phipps</a> and
-<a href="http://blogs.computerworlduk.com/open-enterprise/2012/10/is-amazon-playing-fair/index.htm">Glen
-Moody</a> if you want to learn more about the fundamentals and more
-details about the original story.</p>
-</description>
- </item>
-