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Oh, Amazon.  What in the world is going on in the Kindle-world as of late?  First you are being the target of a class action lawsuit due to your “protective case” cracking it, and now this? 

It seems that Amazon caved to the pressure of a publisher, who decided that they no longer wanted their books available electronically.  So, what does Amazon do?  They remove them from their store, and remotely delete them from the Kindles of anyone who had already bought a copy.  Thousands of customers already plunked down their money, legitimately paid for the e-books, and poof they are gone.  But, on the plus side, Amazon did credit their account back.

The credit is not the point.  When you buy something, you tend to think it is yours to keep.  Most people don’t think that the store can decide they want it back and sneak into your house in the middle of the night, take it, and leave you some cash on the dresser.  It doesn’t usually work that way.

Now the really ironic part to this story?  Which books Amazon removed.  They were George Orwell’s 1984 and Animal Farm.  Yeah, I guess Big Brother was watching and decided he wanted his books back.

Peter Kafka at All Things Digital cites Amazon’s terms of service, which he feels do not seem to allow for this latest action, stating that once users buy a book, they get “the non-exclusive right to keep a permanent copy of the applicable Digital Content and to view, use, and display such Digital Content an unlimited number of times, solely on the Device or as authorized by Amazon as part of the Service and solely for your personal, non-commercial use.”

People are obviously not happy about this latest move on Amazon’s part.  I loved the headline for Seattlest which read “The Amazon Kindle: Now with the new take-backsies Feature.” 

I mean, where does this stop?  Can they just do this again and again to any book whenever a publisher or author wants?  This just really doesn’t seem like a good precedent to me.  Buy a book, and hope they don’t take it back.  You better read fast, so they don’t nab it when you are partway through! 

This, Amazon, is ridiculous.

Fred Von Lohmann, staff attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, says this shows what a difference there is in what consumers expect their rights to be, and reality of the difference between those in the digital and real world.  “There’s an enormous difference between buying a book and buying a tethered media device. And this incident really underscores that fact. Consumers carry with them analog expectations.”

He further goes on to say that while the licensing agreement does state you do not own the book, it also does not state that they can come and take it away.

Apparently, where the big problem came about is in the fact that Amazon’s grant of rights is conditional on the company’s authorization.  And “applicable Digital Content” could be argued to exclude digital content that Amazon isn’t really legally authorized to provide.  Enter the problem.  It seems they didn’t have authorization.

They claim that the books were added to their catalog through their self-service platform by a third-party who didn’t actually have the rights to the books.  Shouldn’t a provider of books have checked this out ahead of time maybe to avoid something like this from happening?

But now, Amazon says they will no longer delete books in this manner.  Interesting.  What manner will they employ in the future when this same situation pops up again?  When someone else comes forward and says “Hey!  You don’t have the right to be selling ‘Johnny Goes to Camp’ on your Kindle!” 

“When we were notified of this by the rights holder, we removed the illegal copies from our systems and from customers’ devices, and refunded customers,” the company said in an e-mailed statement.  “We are changing our systems so that in the future we will not remove books from customers’ devices in these circumstances.”

So, does this mean, that going forward they will simply remove the “illegal” titles from their catalogs and everyone that already bought it is now the proud owner of an illegal copy?

To make it all more interesting, Von Lohmann believes the Federal Trade Commission just may be interested in Amazon’s actions.  He says that the government agency has “been looking into situations in which people who bought music protected by a digital rights management system find themselves denied access to their music when the service shuts down.”  If a book for the Kindle is just a rental, they need to describe it that way, not as a purchase.  “The Kindle gives you the sense that you are buying the book,” he said.

I almost can’t wait to see what Amazon does next.  It’s like you are your own ‘net soap opera.  Will the Kindle keep cracking?  Will Amazon lose the case?  Will Amazon sneak in and steal more books in the dark of night?  Find out next week, on “As The Amazon Turns”.  *munches popcorn and waits for the next episode*

Read [NYTimes]