View Single Post
Old 01-05-2011, 01:53 PM   #422
Elfwreck
Grand Sorcerer
Elfwreck ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.Elfwreck ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.Elfwreck ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.Elfwreck ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.Elfwreck ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.Elfwreck ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.Elfwreck ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.Elfwreck ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.Elfwreck ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.Elfwreck ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.Elfwreck ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.
 
Elfwreck's Avatar
 
Posts: 5,187
Karma: 25133758
Join Date: Nov 2008
Location: SF Bay Area, California, USA
Device: Pocketbook Touch HD3 (Past: Kobo Mini, PEZ, PRS-505, Clié)
Quote:
Originally Posted by jamthecat View Post
I guess contracts mean nothing, be they implied, imprinted or written in indelible ink. Amazon's a private company that can do as it likes. And I'm sure you would not mind your bank feeling the same way about your mortgage or car loan or credit card agreement. They can change the rate ANY time they please and the contract be damned. Right.
Amazon has not violated its contract (unless your publisher had an agreement that they'd carry the book for a specific length of time), but it has (1) acted directly against its stated goals, (2) accepted slander (libel?) and harmed your income & reputation thereby, and (3) dealt with you in bad faith, by implying that your books *now* violate their content terms when they didn't before. Those might all be actionable; they're not specifically "breach of contract."

It's possible that contracts that say "we can stop doing business with you at any time with no warning and no reasons" are not legal on their own, but there are an awful lot of them, and challenging that concept would take extensive legal setup. (Contracts that say "we can change the terms of this contract at any time with no warning" are not legally enforceable in my state, but that's somewhat different.) An expectation of communication and rational standards, established through verbal contract or other business procedures, may apply even if the written contract directly says otherwise, but you'd need a GOOD business lawyer to push that one.

About calling your books "pornography:" it's a meaningless term. It has no legal definition (in the US; I don't know about other countries). "Obscene" material--which does have a legal definition, albeit a subjective and fairly useless one--can be "pornographic," but the issue of what that means has never directly been addressed.

Too much of the US is sex-phobic, and they've been allowed to declare that "pornography is evil" without ever having to say what that is, so everyone tacitly agrees that porn is bad without agreeing on whether that means "just sex with no coherent plot" or "contains explicit sexual scenes" or "kinky, not-normal sex" or "sex in circumstances that a lot of people don't think are sexual" or something else.

Amazon is counting on the stigma of "pornography" being so strong that the authors they penalize won't be able to challenge them, not in the courtroom (because their contracts are vague and self-serving), and not in the court of public opinion, because there's always people willing to declare "who CARES what happens to the PERVERTS who read and write that stuff?" rather than realize that they're letting a commercial enterprise dictate morality.
Elfwreck is offline