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Originally Posted by Harmon
Think of it this way. You hire a guy to fix your bathroom plumbing. You give him the key to your house, and go out for a cup of coffee. Meanwhile, the plumber spots a book in the bathroom you borrowed from his brother a couple of years ago, and decides to pick it up and take it back to his brother.
Where's your beef? You can't say that the plumber wasn't authorized to be in your house. Heck, you gave him the key. You can't say that he took anything that belonged to you. All you can do is decide not to hire him again.
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I'm not sure of that. It seems like a frightening privacy invasion, of the kind that courts like to disallow in order to encourage people not to be paranoid.
(OTOH, given what I've seen of privacy in recent cases, maybe it does work like that. In which case, I'm probably not paranoid enough. Sigh. I don't think I'm committing any accidental crimes, but I certainly don't like the idea that the plumber has the right to grab the books I've borrowed from my shelves if he knows who they should be returned to.)
I have possession of a copy of a book that was pulled from publication because of copyright infringement. Who owns it? Me? The author who plagiarized to create it? The author he plagiarized from--but didn't copy directly from; much of the book was written by the new author?
I'm not asking who I might be required to turn it over to with a court ruling; I'm asking who has the right to grab it from my hands if they happen to see me with it on the street.
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That works for legitimate sales, I think. I don't see that it works where the sale is not legitimate in the first place, unless it turns out that Amazon is in the business, deliberately or in effect, of defrauding copyright owners and buyers by selling infringing ebooks. Which they aren't.
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It works because Amazon tells customers that their store is full of legitimate ebooks; they don't warn customers that some unknown amount of their purchases may be decided to be not permitted, and revoked, at any time.
For one example, it's not a problem that'd hold up in court. But if there are more (and there will be; they pulled the Harry Potter books a while back, and I suspect there are plenty more books that are lower-profile than Rand and Rowling's works), and the "more" is substantial, then Amazon is enticing customers to buy Kindles on false premises.
Saying "we have 200,000 books in our store" is fraud if 50,000 of them are fake, and won't be permitted to be kept. Of course, the illegal books are much, much less than that. But the principle holds no matter how small the number is--the only issue is whether a very small number could be proven to cause damages to the customer. If a single customer had half a dozen books revoked in a year, that could be argued to be a substantial portion of their expected reading time.
If the average person reads less than 10 books a year, then having five purchases revoked/refunded shows a big problem with Amazon's bookstore.
A lawsuit involving this would probably have to get into details that Amazon doesn't like to discuss--how long is a Kindle expected to last, how many books do people usually buy per year?