Quote:
Originally Posted by JoeD
...nor does it mean the person who has lost access to their account is an idiot for not doing so.
*snip*
People in general don't know much if anything about DRM until it bites them, companies go out of their way to hide that it even exists or what its impact can have. There may very well be a lot of amazon customers now googling how to backup their purchases as a result of this story, who previously only stored a couple of books on their device and left the rest "backed up" in the archive. I don't think they're idiots for not having known to do so before hand.
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Exactly. I think it's pretty rich that people are calling
the customer an idiot. Most people who adopt ereaders are older. They're used to a far more honest system: you pay for it, it's yours.
My generation's system goes a little more like this: you pay for it, and we allow you to touch it, but only until we want it back or decide we need more money and devise a way to make you buy it all over again.
You're calling
the customer an idiot for getting screwed by a business? This is sort of like the consumer version of "well, with that top she was wearing, she was asking for it."
Amazon, their competition, and the publishers are
loving the fact that the first ebook adopters are older and less tech-savvy than the first mp3 adopters were. It means they can get away with screwing customers for a little bit longer, while older users figure out how to protect themselves like the youngsters and the geeks already have. In the mean time, they've got plenty of time to lobby the government to make the act of users protecting themselves illegal.
And they're supposed to just magically know this how? How did
you find out about it? It's not like companies have ever been particularly forthcoming about the fact that they DRM, or what their DRM's can actually do to you and your content.
I learned by getting bitten. Like most people did. And, probably, like most of you did.
I think it's really odd that you're reading about someone who has basically been suckered out of a fairly large sum of money by a company, and your first reaction is to blame the customer for
not breaking the law in order to protect themselves from said company. A company, no less, that is well-known to be untrustworthy even by the people who rave about how awesome they are.
Do you not see what's wrong with that?
1. Why are you blaming the paying customer for the company's actions?
2. Why are you acting like it's normal and acceptable for companies to be this bad to their customers, and customers should compensate for that?
3. Why are you encouraging illegal behavior over, oh, I dunno, maybe pushing the company to be better to its customers?
4. How do some of you not see how your attitude of "blame the victim" relates to increased piracy?