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Originally Posted by HansTWN
People got a lot more than just their money back in the Amazon case, they got $30.- each, if remember correctly. If you buy a stolen pbook the real owner could easily come to your house and take it back. They will if it is a valuable book. If an honest person finds out they bought stolen goods they will contact the police, anyway. Even if they lose some money on the deal.
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When buying a pbook in a store, I do not expect that the store stole it somewhere. They may have bought it legally in another country, and then resell it in the Netherlands. For most goods, this is no problem, but it could be that the publisher doesn't want the book to be sold in the Netherlands and finds a way to legally summon the store to take it out of their inventory.
That is not my problem. I saw the book there, I paid for it, so it's mine now, whatever happens between the store and the publisher. If the store or publisher wants to take it away in exchange for some perks such as extra money or coupons, then they have to either *ASK* me to agree, or do it through the police, quoting some law that makes it legal for them to do that.
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As for your sofa analogy, that is not quite correct. Even if the store where you bought the DRMed books goes broke you can still read the books you bought there afterwards.
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Not if these books are on a device that needs to be in contact with the seller at all times to be able to open the book. I don't know if there are such devices or apps already, but on computers, this is normal practice with games and many programs, nowadays. If the seller goes broke, the authentication server goes down, and your game or program won't start.
To be honest, I fully expect the Kindle, Kobo and Sony readers to start functioning like that. I wouldn't even be surprised if they scrapped the capability to side-load books, or your own documents, for that matter, and only accept DRM-ed books that are continually checked over the internet.