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Originally Posted by Sporadic
Again, for the last time, poor analogies of stores breaking into your house to retrieve bootlegged items and Amazon monitoring everything that is on is on your (nonexistent) Kindle are uncalled for.
3000+ books are added to the Kindle store every single day and anybody is able to upload material. Amazon can't possibly look at everything.
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It's their store. They have an obligation to make sure what's being sold there is legal content.
Physical stores don't get away with, "Oh, I didn't realize those books hadn't been released for the public yet; we'll just go grab them back from everyone who bought them." The handful of stores that sold Harry Potter books before the release date got in serious trouble for it... the customers did not.
And if IP is comparable to physical property, with a legal right to remove it from someone who bought it in good faith... then the company that sold it is liable for promoting stolen goods. "I didn't realize that truck was full of contraband when I bought 500 iPods for $40 each" is not an argument that'll hold up in court.
Amazon is responsible for what's sold on their servers, using their software, in their store. Saying "oh, there's too many to monitor" is no excuse. If they don't have the staff to monitor book uploads, they need to allow less books until they do have enough staff.
If Amazon wants to play the part of publisher for ebooks, they get the same legal hassles as other publishers, including the headaches of trying to sort out IP law violations.
This one caught people's attention, as did the previous Harry Potter ebook sale-and-removal. But I do wonder how many other unauthorized ebooks are available on Amazon, from mid-list authors, or deceased authors whose publishers don't keep track of these things. Amazon needs to assign someone to check every single upload, before some publisher slaps them with a huge lawsuit for selling their books w/o permission.