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Originally Posted by kindlekitten
the tinfoil hat crowd are convinced that Amazon is going to pull a big brother and pull any ill gotten acquisitions from their Kindles willy nilly. *sigh*
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Interesting point. Some copyright holders would probably be pleased if they did. I wonder how it stands up though?
Correct me if I’m wrong, but my understanding is that Amazon/Kindle are booksellers rather than publishers. Middle-men in other words. If I was running Amazon, these would be two of my objectives:
1) Maximise the sales of books. I’d certainly try to do this by trying to match my pitches to the reader’s likely preferences.
2) Minimise any problems with the publishers and authors who supply the content.
With regard to the second point, I really wouldn’t want to waste a lot of time and resources on acting as unpaid policeman or nanny for all the other parties. However, I would want to protect myself from allegations by my suppliers that I’d failed to take reasonable steps to shield their property from theft. I’d be especially cautious about being left open to charges that I had facilitated rip offs - even unintentionally.
A case recent went through the Australian courts in which a group of very powerful movie interests sued a local ISP for failing to stop some of their subscribers from using the Internet to illegally download copies of movies. They weren’t accusing them of providing the software or sites - just of
failing to prevent that kind of traffic via their network. A big demand.
So I still can’t really see anything in this but Amazon attempting to steer a prudent line between their suppliers and their customers. I don’t imagine that they would themselves want to get involved with deciding what content was ‘illegal’ and deleting it, and would probably resist pressure from publishers to actively behave as their police force.
However, my guess is that they
would want to keep firm control over how many devices you can download your book to. If they didn’t then you could simply get all your mates to hook up to your account and download dozens of copies onto multiple devices (I currently have 3 devices authorised - none of which are an actual Kindle - they are 2 PCs and an iTouch ). So ‘electronic surveillance’ of the books you got from them seems inevitable (and reasonable enough). My understanding is that the publishers themselves set down how many devices they allow you to ‘authorise’ and may limit how many times you can freely re-download before it cuts out (at which point you can give a reason and apply for it to be extended). I don’t know if this is up-to-date or if it varies much between publishers and selling sites.
Would they really want to open such a controversial can of worms by wiping stuff? I doubt it. I don’t imagine they’d really want to get involved in policing anything other than the e-books they had already sold to us.
That’s my guess anyway.
