Amazon the history revisionist
News has been making the rounds that Some E-books are More Equal than Others. Funny to see an Animal Farm quote referencing 1984, but I digress. The piece by David Pogue explains how Amazon issued a compulsory recall, no user intervention required, on copies of 1984 sold by a particular publisher. To the best of my knowledge this is the first automatic recall, let alone from Amazon, and since then Amazon has claimed that they won’t force you to return your books in the future.
What happened? Well, MobileReference was selling copies of Orwell’s 1984. In some countries the work is public domain. Unfortunately pdregistry.ca is presently down so I can’t say with authority whether it’s public domain in Canada, but I believe it is. Judging from their package of 3,000+ classics for $50, MobileReference took from the public domain and improved on it, then sold their improved versions. The problem is the book isn’t public domain in the United States, where their Kindle edition was sold.
Once Amazon was contacted by the American rightsholders they decided to institute a recall. They refunded users and deleted their books. The problem is the recall wasn’t voluntary as every other recall to date.
When a product is recalled it’s usually because there’s a danger to it. When someone steps on a patent or copyright holder’s toes, it’s usually up to the owner to file a lawsuit, and then they can claim the ill-gotten (or in this case mistakenly-gotten, I chalk MobileReference’s mistake up to ignorance or negligence rather than malice) gains. Now, that usually happens because it’s difficult to replace a product with a legitimate one, or to reassign gains. What could Amazon have done here? Maybe reassign the commissions to the rights holders? Maybe reassign the commission and replace the infringing book with a legitimate one?
It seems that Amazon has already promised that they won’t delete the infringing books. Maybe they’ll replace them, if they can figure out how to preserve bookmarks. Maybe they’ll just change who the royalties go to. Maybe they’ll just stop sales and tell the rights holders to pursue remuneration through the courts.
Are automatic recalls unfair? It’s hard to say. It certainly is a lot less harmful all around than lawsuits but publishers and authors shouldn’t forget that consumers are rightsholders too. If there’s an automatic recall it damn well better put the buyer’s needs first.
Thumbnail image by surfstyle and licensed under CC BY 2.0. Thanks surfstyle!
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9 Comments to “Amazon the history revisionist”
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I think it’s problematic that software would have an automatic recall feature in the first place. That’s an anti-feature if I’ve ever heard one — when would that ever actually be in the buyer’s best interest?
I mean, if you don’t even have control over the files, you’re not a buyer. You’re just renting.
Pretty easy to see when it’s in the user’s best interest: When they want a refund on an ebook. That was what the feature was intended for.
An automatic recall? For a case where a user wants a refund, why does the software need to give Amazon the ability to unilaterally make a book disappear?
I suppose they could ask, and only give the refund if the user says yes, but ostensibly the function was designed to be called once the user has already agreed to delete the book. Using it this way was an abuse. Not using it could open them up to liability if they chose to do nothing.
Yeah, it just seems to be like… if that sort of functionality exists, it will be abused eventually. It’s pure temptation.
Even if they don’t intend to use it abusively, the liability issue is their own fault for giving themselves that power in the first place. If you bought a physical book from a store, the seller wouldn’t be liable if some problem was found with it at a later date. They wouldn’t be expected to knock on your door and demand it back. But Amazon puts itself in a position when other rights holders could put pressure on it to use the kill switch because they know it exists.
I don’t think this is the last time it’ll be a source of embarrassment for the Kindle.
Sure, it’ll be abused, but there’s no way to have refunds without the potential for abuse.
Have a way of verifying that the user voluntarily deleted a work? They’ll be forced to suspend the user’s account until the user deletes the work.
Unilaterally delete the work? We’ve seen the consequences.
Trust that the user will delete the work? Then users will abuse the trust by getting the refund and keeping the work. Same reason why you can’t get refunds on opened software, music or movies.
Why not check to see if the work exists on the device? I don’t see why a user’s account would have to be suspended in the interim… (And if it isn’t DRMed as hell and the user can make a copy elsewhere, then the automatic recall suffers from that same weakness.)
More importantly, why do you need refunds (well, more specifically, “returns”) on digital goods anyways? A refund feature is an anti-feature if it means you can’t own an e-book to begin with. As a customer, I’d rather not be able to “return” a purchased digital file than to never actually have any ownership or control over it.
The automatic recall issue just seems like a surface level symptom of much deeper problems. They’re trying to make bits behave like atoms. Except, not even… they’re trying to make bits behave like atoms, only in the ways that atoms are worse than bits. You have the “recall,” as if it were a physical object, yet it can be done automatically (whereas Indigo wouldn’t walk into your home to take your books back if there was an issue with them).
It reminds me of the Penny Arcade comic about Playstation home. Tyko writes, “chief among these bizarre maneuvers is the idea that, when manufacturing their flimsy dystopia, they actually ported the pernicious notion of scarcity from our world into their digital one. This is like having the ability to shape being from non-being at the subatomic level, and the first thing you decide to make is AIDS.”
Then, I start to think… even most proprietary software vendors wouldn’t really “recall” software… but they’d patch it (with or without your knowledge or consent). In some ways, that’s an even scarying version of digital book burning.
I just think the automatic recall and refund questions are unsurprising symptoms of an approach that’s… well, defective by design.
Oh, I thought the links had been stripped for a second. Just in case they’re too subtle:
1. Penny Arcade Comic:
http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2008/12/12/
2. Tyko writes:
http://www.penny-arcade.com/2008/12/12/
3. scarier* version of digital book burning:
http://www.citmedialaw.org/blog/2009/future-digital-book-burning-why-remote-line-item-retraction-scarier-remote-volume-deletion
If you buy an illegal copy of a work, you don’t own it either. This isn’t a case of making bits behave like atoms, this is a case of not having a logistics problem that atoms would get you.
As for refunding digital goods, well, plenty of reasons, not the least of which is formatting issues. I would like to be able to refund a book I don’t enjoy too.