Making sense of the '1984' Kindle kerfuffle

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13512_3-10290133-23.html

by jgfoot • 17 years ago

6 6 17 years ago

news.cnet.com

anigbrowl• 17 years ago

An unecessarily egotistical article, but I didn't realize the fuss was over a copyright dispute (tl;dr 1984 digital edition put out by someone on the basis that it was out of copyright in several territories).

It would be very interesting to know if Kindle copies were deleted in the countries where the book is in fact out of copyright. And I'd like to see some serious (rather than moralistic) discussion of how we should approach differing copyright terms in a wired world.

derefr• 17 years ago

> It would be very interesting to know if Kindle copies were deleted in the countries where the book is in fact out of copyright.

They likely were. I'd say that the copyright covers the information in Amazon's central Kindle database, which is presumably under US jurisdiction, and that all the other devices simply reflect any changes in this database unless you hack them not to.

mechanical_fish• 17 years ago

This is a decent summary of the situation, but the editorial comment at the end is tone-deaf:

Somewhat regrettably, I think, Amazon has pledged to stop doing what it did in this case--which was, I think exactly the right thing to do...

Amazon's action may have served the narrow interests of justice [1], and may even have been necessary to avoid big legal penalties, but it was terrible marketing. The last thing Amazon wants to do is to remind people that a Kindle is not a tool for reading books that you own. It's best viewed as a tool for renting books for an indefinite period.

(I actually like the Kindle, and am still thinking of getting one someday, but I have no confidence that a DRM-protected Kindle book will outlive the hardware it lives on. To me, the Kindle would merely be a way to streamline the process of buying a book, reading it, and then selling it again. If I want to keep a book I'll stick with the paper version.)

The problem is that rental has lower profit margins. People's mental model of book rental is based on the library, where the apparent price is "free". A Kindle book's big profit margin is dependent on the illusion that buying the book actually makes you the owner of the book and that it will behave as real books do.

And, of course, there's no tradition of people banning cars they don't like, then having the police drag those cars away. But there is a long tradition of book-banning and book-burning that Amazon is unwise to evoke.

I'm a little bit hopeful that this debacle will help accelerate the decline of ebook prices.

---

[1] If you define current copyright law, which effectively ensures that everything invented after Mickey Mouse will remain under copyright forever, as "justice".

Create• 17 years ago

No. You are missing the point: this incident was not an accident, a bug or a mishap. The featureset of the Kindle was deliberately premeditated to ensure the fulfilment of the requirement that allows for the revocation of the Right to Read. Effort has been spent to have this capability. It is Chekhov's principle:

If in the first act you have hung a pistol on the wall, then in the following one it should be fired. Otherwise don't put it there.

And judging the book in question by its cover, one might be tempted to think, that it was a bait: and apparently the well educated, clear-headed lawyers/managers who pulled the plug had obviously no idea what they were doing. If they knew, then all the worse.

ars• 17 years ago

Interesting, but I don't know if it's so valid.

Precedence in the US is if someone sold something in violation of copyright, the purchasers don't have to return it, instead the publisher is fined, with the money going to the copyright holder.

Just because Amazon could delete it, doesn't mean it should. At least not until ordered to do so by a judge.

BearOfNH• 17 years ago

The analogy with a car is specious. There is just one car, as opposed to unlimited copies of a file. Plus the State has vested interests in automobile ownership and licensing. If on the other hand you had a stolen copy of _1984_ on your coffee table I very seriously doubt the police would bother to repo it, believing it to be a civil matter.

My wife (who actually IS a lawyer) goes even further. If you bought your hard-copy of _1984_ in good faith (say, from a bookbinder who sold it to you instead of rebinding it for a customer), then in fact you ARE the legal owner of the book, and the customer who got screwed has to seek restitution from the bookbinder -- who might also wind up in jail guilty of fraud. I'm not sure that's justice but according to my wife, that's the law in our state.

Making sense of the '1984' Kindle kerfuffle

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