Members techristian Posted July 22, 2009 Members Share Posted July 22, 2009 Check out this link. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/32014285/ns/technology_and_science-tech_and_gadgets/wid/11915829?GT1=40006 Amazon took back copies of "1984" and "Animal Farm" from kindle users and gave them a refund claiming DRM ! Dan Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members AwayEam Posted July 22, 2009 Members Share Posted July 22, 2009 HEY BRO What a bunch of goofballs. Of all the books to choose Can the Kindle read PDFs? I'm pretty sure most of these books can be pirated in that format like they were #1 jams. On another note, how's your city strike going? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members Rabid Posted July 22, 2009 Members Share Posted July 22, 2009 The strange part is someone negotiating rights to digital versions of the books without having the legal power. I would guess Amazon had no recourse but to take the books back. I would like to know more about how that happened. Could it be a case of dealing with a company that owned rights in some formats but not digital that worked out the bad deal? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members techristian Posted July 23, 2009 Author Members Share Posted July 23, 2009 HEY BRO What a bunch of goofballs. Of all the books to choose Can the Kindle read PDFs? I'm pretty sure most of these books can be pirated in that format like they were #1 jams. On another note, how's your city strike going? The grass is 3 feet high in the public parks and some people have 50 bags of garbage on their front lawn. It has been almost 4 months. Dan Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members AwayEam Posted July 23, 2009 Members Share Posted July 23, 2009 The grass is 3 feet high in the public parks and some people have 50 bags of garbage on their front lawn. It has been almost 4 months.Dan HEY BRO That's gross. The grass is only about a foot high in our parks. I do think Spadina Ave will have to be burnt to the ground to prevent contamination of the rest of our city, though. It's disgusting at the best of times, and the 1 month (so far) strike hasn't helped. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members Geoff Grace Posted July 25, 2009 Members Share Posted July 25, 2009 We're lucky that Amazon revealed this ability early on. The potential abuse of this power is really disturbing: If Apple or Amazon can decide to delete stuff you've legally purchased, then surely a court -- or, to channel Orwell, perhaps even a totalitarian regime -- could force them to do the same. When books were banned in the past, governments could, at best, only block the sale of new copies. But in the digital era, they can go much further.So far, Amazon has only deleted books that were already available in print. But in our paperless future -- when all books exist as files on servers -- courts would have the power to make works vanish completely. With a simple ruling over a copyright dispute or a claim of libel, judges could simultaneously block the sale of new books and pull all current copies out of circulation. More here: Amazon kindles new privacy concerns Best, Geoff Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members Ernest Buckley Posted July 26, 2009 Members Share Posted July 26, 2009 The cool thing about the Kindle is that Montag won! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members Rabid Posted July 26, 2009 Members Share Posted July 26, 2009 We're lucky that Amazon revealed this ability early on. The potential abuse of this power is really disturbing:More here:Amazon kindles new privacy concernsBest,Geoff When you sell something you don't have the right to sell you are basically selling stollen goods. Should people that buy stollen goods be allowed to keep them? As a musician, if the Russian sites that were selling MP3's could be forced to take them back and refund money, wouldn't you want that to happen? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members halfnote Posted July 26, 2009 Members Share Posted July 26, 2009 We're lucky that Amazon revealed this ability early on. The potential abuse of this power is really disturbing... Elsewhere someone has advised me that Jeff Bezos appologised for this, calling the revocation of the data files "stupid & contrary to Amazon's guiding principles" but I don't buy that as anything more than attempted face-saving. I for one, have long thought the whole corporate entity of Amazon is one of the worst; they're quite like WalMart as a corporation, esp. as regards their lower-tier employees. One of the big things about this is not just the idea that a company would revoke material that one had bought, or even that they have the ability to do so but that, without some clear regulation & control, this offers some unsettling possibilites for privacy & for ownership in the digital future. It also is worth consideration how censorship could be applied via such methods. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members Duddits Posted July 26, 2009 Members Share Posted July 26, 2009 When you sell something you don't have the right to sell you are basically selling stollen goods. Should people that buy stollen goods be allowed to keep them? Yes. If you bought a book from Barnes & Noble, and it turned out in a squabble of publishers that the one that printed your book didn't have the right to sell it, would you tolerate an employee from Barnes & Noble sneaking into your house in the middle of the night and removing the book from your shelf? That's what this is. It could have / should have been resolved in court or through a settlement. It could all have been done with behind the scenes swaps of money. There is a remote chance a court may have even ultimately ordered Amazon to remove the book from people's kindles. But there's a huge difference difference between Amazon removing a book from people's kindles with a gun to its head, the only way it should ever remove a sold book, and voluntarily Big Brothering its way into people's kindles and removing it in the dead of night. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members Geoff Grace Posted July 27, 2009 Members Share Posted July 27, 2009 When you sell something you don't have the right to sell you are basically selling stollen goods. Should people that buy stollen goods be allowed to keep them? As a musician, if the Russian sites that were selling MP3's could be forced to take them back and refund money, wouldn't you want that to happen? It's not this incident that I'm concerned with but the Pandora's Box it opens, as alluded to by the quote I referenced. Let's forget about the tree for a moment and look at the forrest. If we let devices like Kindle become the norm, then when hard copies of books are no longer sold, future governments that wish to ban books will have the ability to erase all copies in an instant of any book in existence. That amazing thing is that this happened with copies of 1984. It's as if someone is bludgeoning us over the head with a message -- Hey, look what can happen when you voluntarily give up control! This was just a tiny taste -- look at its potential to help build a world like the one in "1984." Hello? Hello? Anybody home? Huh? Think, McFly. Think! Best, Geoff Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members halfnote Posted July 29, 2009 Members Share Posted July 29, 2009 Not just erase the books but rease or alter sections, so that the changes might not be obvious withough deep examination. One might offer a recommendation of material never knowing that it had been altered.We think revisionist history is a problem now; what does the future hold ? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members slight-return Posted July 29, 2009 Members Share Posted July 29, 2009 That amazing thing is that this happened with copies of 1984. I kinda wondering if it was a greyhat caper and if the choice of material was contrived though I think a Bentham/Foulcault type riff would have been a little more down the line (I personally think folks tend to read 1984 kinda flat - I always suggest reading "down and out..." first to get an Orwell sense), it probably wouldn't have the same popular impact Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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