Amazon is being sued for remotely deleting copies of George Orwell’s 1984 from Kindles. It later explained the action was taken because the copy in question was provided by a third party that did not have the right to sell it. Read the full story at Reuters. It seems that in one of the cases it deleted a student’s ‘copious’ notes with the eBook.
This will be an interesting case to follow because it really deals with the question of ownership. The offended Kindle-user bought the eBook for .99 in good faith with a reasonable expectation that he would have access to the information. He was never given a reason for the deletion or provided a replacement. The question is, does Amazon have the right to delete or effectively ‘destroy’ someone’s property? If I committed such an act it would be called theft or vandalism.
If Amazon doesn’t have the right to act on property it sells, then one could argue that Amazon does not have the right to dictate what an individual does with his/her property after the sale.
So one has to wonder if digitally locking and restricting access to digital property is legal.
1 ping
[…] talked about Amazon’s dictatorial ways a few days ago. Read it here. Well, they received enough complaints for arbitrarily entering the Private Property of Kindle […]