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Originally Posted by Harmon
I'm not saying that the buyers of the infringed products have themselves infringed. I am saying that they do not in any legal sense own the ebook.
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Why not? They paid for it, just like they paid for a physical book that is later determined to be infringing on copyright. It's not like stolen property--nobody else is "missing" the one they bought.
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And just consider for a moment - you have a pirated copy of Harry Potter, prior to release of the book. You advertise it on ebay. I'll bet that the publisher would have a marshal knocking on your door in 24 hours, injunction in hand, along with an order from the court impounding the book.
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1) That'd be offering to distribute, not admitting ownership.
2) Marshall, yes. Order from court, yes. Neither Warner Brothers nor JK Rowling has the right to come to my door and demand that (hypothetical) copy.
I'm not saying the ebooks couldn't be legally recovered from the people who purchased them; I'm questioning whether Amazon had the right to do so, without a court order allowing them to invade their customer's privacy.
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Yeah, but where's the damage? "You don't keep a copy of the book I have no right to have, like you said you would."
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The damage is the money they spent on Kindles, thinking they allowed you to keep the products you'd purchased and download them again at will. And the time they spent browsing the Amazon ebook store, expecting to find new books to read. And the money they spent on other products at Amazon.com because they were convenient to ebook searches.
A website that says, "once you pay for the device and your content, you have access to it forever"--which Bezos has said in interviews--is lying to its customers if that's not what they actually offer. Just like a restaurant that said "all you can eat" would be guilty of fraud if they turned people away for not properly using napkins... without telling them that napkin-usage was a prerequisite for refilling one's plate.
Refunding the price of the meal is not enough; there's also the price of gas to get there, and the time spent in line, and so on. At the Kindle store, the ancillary costs are minor... except for the cost of the device itself.
If you have to buy a $350 suit of a specific style to get into the all-you-can-eat diner, refunding the $10 plate fee isn't much of an advantage. Being told "you can come back tomorrow, but we might turn you away then, too," isn't much help.