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Originally Posted by Katsunami
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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Actually, for this particular incident (the Amazon case), think of Amazon like a consignment shop. If a consignment shop sells something for a person, and that thing is later determined to be stolen, then the police absolutely have the right to come in and take the object from the buyer, with no compensation at all.
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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.
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If Amazon were to make their books dependent on an always on connection to authenticate, they would have to change it so that all ebooks on Amazon use DRM. Why would they do that? If they were truly concerned about tying people to the device like that, they wouldn't allow things to be sold with no DRM in the first place.
Also, for the sofa analogy used earlier, think of it more like this--you don't lose access to your sofa if the store goes out of business, you just lose access to any warrantee that you may have had.
Shari