From what I've read and heard in the past few days, the deal is this.
Amazon had/has contracted with many firms or individuals representing
themselves as firms to provide electronic versions of books.
Amazon did not do a good enough job of checking the authenticity of
these contractors, and found itself in the position of distributing
one or more books to Kindle users without the express written
permission of the copyright holders.
When the copyright holders complained, Amazon sucked the illegally
distributed (by them) volumes out of everyone's Kindle. To protect
themselves against serious lawsuits. They returned everyone's money,
and, for all we know, now have legal copies of the same works (in some
cases) available for purchase once more.
They are working on a system where the kids notes would not be sucked
back should this ever happen again. And that seems not too hard to do,
allowing user input to be stored separately from the text of the books.
Time will deal with it.
On Jul 19, 2009, at 12:12 , John Sessoms wrote:
From: John Francis
On Sun, Jul 19, 2009 at 02:02:43PM +0200, AlunFoto wrote:
> 2009/7/19 Graydon <[email protected]>:
> > The thing to think about is whether or not one wants to do
business with
> > a company like that.
> > Oh, absolutely! :-) > That's why I don't have a Kindle.
> > Maybe I'm too cynical, but I tend to think that one gets what
one has
> paid for by buying into Amazon's scheme.
> > Jostein
I find it amusing (although, sadly, in no way surprising) that much
of
the anger here is being directed against Amazon - a company who acted
to preserve intellectual property rights - and not against the
lowlife
who illegally sold the infringing copies.
One might reasonably ask why Amazon permitted such a lowlife to use
the kindle to distribute "infringing copies" in the first place.
If Amazon had performed due diligence BEFORE permitting said
"lowlife" access to their kindle network, they wouldn't have had to
act to "preserve intellectual property rights" after the fact.
Amazon is trying to portray themselves in the role of the virtuous
victim, when, in fact, they played the roll of the FENCE,
distributing stolen property.
Amazon has done wrong TWICE. First by distributing the "infringing
copies", and then by stealing them back from their customers.
Joseph McAllister
Pentaxian
http://gallery.me.com/jomac
http://web.me.com/jomac/show.me/Blog/Blog.html
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