[Worldwalker]

Originally Posted by TallMomof2

Amazon (or any company) is not going to enter people's homes to remove books that violate copyright. At most they might request that the book be returned (on their dime) and refund the purchase price.

Exactly. But they claim the right to enter people's ebook readers and remove books that violate copyright. How is that any different?

If they sold a paper book they weren't authorized to sell, they'd settle up with the rights owners. Doing it that way has worked fine for ages. There's no reason they couldn't have done exactly that with the ebook. No reason ... except that they had the power, so they used it.

I can bet you that if Sony or any other company could remove books from their device, the same would happen.

One word: Rootkit. I know exactly what Sony would do if they could; they've done it.

Which is why I bought an ebook reader that does not let anyone remove books from it, and why I do not buy DRM'd ebooks.

It took a lot of soul-searching before I was willing to buy anything from Sony -- I'd been boycotting them since the rootkit episode -- but it came down to Sony or Amazon, and it looks like I went the right way.

I'm simply tired of seeing any company slammed for upholding the law.

Nobody is slamming any company for upholding the law (though, I should point out, they are supposed to be obeying the law, not enforcing it; if citizens' property is to be seized, that is done by the courts, not by a private company). Since I'm a little unclear on the subject, could please you point me to the section of the law (US Federal Code, presumably, since Amazon is a US company) that requires a corporation to enter a customer's private property (and my computer and my ebook reader are as much my property as my bedroom is) and confiscate items that the customer bought in good faith from that company, but which the company was not authorized to sell? And does that law not also apply to physical goods, so that Amazon would be likewise required to send out people to sneak into customers' houses and reclaim paper books, presumably leaving refund checks behind?

The book buyers did nothing wrong. Amazon did something wrong -- it sold a book without authorization from the rights holders. That could easily be remedied by exactly the same means that has been used for as long as there have been copyright laws: the infringer paying damages to the owner. There was absolutely no reason to confiscate books from legitimate buyers. Amazon owed Orwell's ghost money; the good-faith buyers of those books didn't owe anyone anything. They should never have been involved in the dispute at all.

As long as it the deletions stay limited to copyright violations I don't see it as a problem. That's simply my opinion.

"As long as...." But it's never "as long as" and it's never "limited". It was, ironically, George Orwell who wrote "The purpose of power is power." When power exists, it will be used. That's how human beings are.

And who determines whether something is a copyright violation? Will they use the same high-precision tools as the rest of the entertainment industry, which has (among other things) tried to extort thousands of dollars from people on the concept that a file, no matter how small and non-movie-related, which has a name similar to a movie is that movie, and good luck proving a negative? Or, for that matter, Sony and the rootkit? They had the power to do what is normally considered to be among the blackest of black-hat hacking -- something that would be a Federal felony if you or I did it -- so they did. The purpose of power is power.

There is already a mechanism in place for dealing with this situation. It's the same one that would be used if Amazon had sold a paper book they didn't have the right to sell. It involves C&D orders. It involves civil court. It involves money, possibly a large chunk thereof, paid by Amazon to whoever Amazon was cheating. It does not involve customers or their books at all.

Again, look at the pirate edition of Lord of the Rings as an example. When Ace brought it out, Allen & Unwin sued them (and possibly more important, the fan community threw a collective public fit). Ace stopped selling the books, and JRRT got some money out of it. But nobody confiscated the books that had already been sold. Nobody sent goons out to take books out of people's libraries. Nobody would have dreamed of doing that. And nobody even asked them to mail the books back. The system worked.

And there is no reason why the system could not and should not continue to work exactly that way today.