Quote:
Originally Posted by daffy4u
I have some extra tin foil I'd be happy to share with you.  |
Sure. Sony DID do something stupid (rootkits) but backed off on it, and removed the rootkit-using CD's from the market, and have since stopped deploying them.
Amazon's yet to do anything like that with the Kindle - they just promise 'not to do it again', at least not the way they did it before. As I said, the article's got issues... but Amazon has other issues. At least Sony stopped doing that shit. And that's one reason I'm not going to buy a Kindle - on top of the restrictive DRM scheme.
Beyond that, the issue remains: they have a backdoor to remove books, and have already done so. There's nothing to really stop them from doing it again, beyond an unsubstantiated promise - it's not like they're under a contract which would prevent them from pulling a book for any reason, nor are there any legal consequences to doing so that would prevent them from doing so again. The 1984 case was due to legal concerns - that I can understand. However, to completely kill the file remotely versus merely revoking authorizations to open the file, or sending a warning saying 'this book is violating copyright, we will be replacing this copy with a legal one' is what concerns me... as there is literally nothing stopping them from doing that to any book that I have on the device, at least not physically. If there'd at least been a message 'this book is not licensed: delete? Y/N' prompt to have the option to keep the book on my device until they had a replacement ready then I might feel a little more sanguine - but I don't even have the option to refuse in this case.
Imagine what would happen if Stephen King suddenly announced that he was going B&N exclusive - would you be happy to have those books automatically deleted by Amazon if they decided to do so, even if you were refunded the money? It's one thing to say 'the person who published this book didn't have the rights to it', but to remote-delete files from my library because of it, versus replacing it with a legal copy automatically or sending a warning out with a request to delete the book is something that keeps me from Amazon's device. I don't call this paranoia - at least not as much as I call it displeasure with the company over the concept of 'who owns my device and my library'. I've bought a license to view that book, and having Amazon decide that I can't own the book (and then delete it for me without my prompting, or a way to decline) is something that I won't pay for.