Yesterday Rachel said she was waiting for my post on this issue. When she said that, I had no idea what she was talking about. She reminded me, and then Rex Hammock Twittered about it and now Aunt B. has written about it as well.
It’s a story where I turn out to be one of the bad guys. Who is really, when you think about it, one of the good guys.
I have a Kindle 2, and have had since early April. As a young woman disabled by arthritis it is my lifeline, facilitating my love of books while making allowances for my crippled hands. Like Erasmus (or whoever it is that’s always on those book totes you buy from B&N), I’ve often gone without food in these last few months, having spent too much money on books in the Kindle store. It’s so darned easy, when you can just turn the thing on, hit ‘buy’ and start reading. Most of the books are cheaper than in a store. Some of them are so much cheaper it made me start to wonder.
Why can you get a copy of Animal Farm on Kindle for $1.25 when in the store its $9? Being a former licensing manager and a current author I can understand a book being a few dollars cheaper–they’re saving on the paper and the shipping costs, but not on paying the author and agent for the content. But a large savings like that made me wonder.
Enter “Mobile Reference Books“, one of the most popular e-book sites on the web. They’ve been converting things for ebooks before ebooks were popular. Like the Guttenberg Project, Mobile Reference is a place where kind souls have undertaken the mission to convert Public Domain Classics into electronic text, enabling the differently-abled and techgeek alike to have things like Plato’s Republic at their fingertips. Many Mobile Reference books (or MobiBooks, as we ebook geeks call them) are free. But occasionally an enterprising fellow will ask a buck or two for his trouble. Like this gentleman, who wants a mere ninety-nine cents recompense for his trouble of converting all of L.FrankBaum’s Oz works. In a tech world accustomed to shareware, it’s no big deal for us to toss the coder a buck for his skills.
And there are a lot of college students who are getting Kindles, because the cost of the Kindle evaporates when you factor in the savings on textbooks and must-have-for-survey-courses fiction.
Enter the University Swashbuckler. This guy, in a former life, sold old term-papers. Every college and university has at least one of these ersatz Reds. They’re the guys in that institution who can get it for you. For a price, of course. And now that any fellow can code a book, upload it to Mobile Reference and ask a buck or two for his trouble, there is new fertile ground for cash. A lot of books out there, like Orwell’s Animal Farm and 1984 seem like they should be in the Public Domain. They’re really old. The guy who wrote them is dead. You have to read them for a class with other books that ARE in the public domain. So people didn’t quaver about getting them off Mobi and paying the buck or two that the literary pirate was asking.
I check every book I get from Mobi against the public domain. If it isn’t PD, I don’t get it. Not for free and not for a buck or two. And when the Orwell books, which I thought about buying, didn’t check out I didn’t buy them. I might have even dropped a line to Mobile Reference saying “hey, by the way….” And I’m sure others did, too. Because a lot of us love books and love the rules whereby those who write books can sometimes make a living doing so.
I was bothered last night to see the spin turn into “Amazon is Stealing Our Books”. Because Amazon wasn’t stealing anyone’s book. Those people were attempting to steal–perhaps unknowingly, but stealing nonetheless–Orwell’s books.
Just Another Pretty Farce 
I will admit the ‘idea’ behind the ease and usage of electronic readers are great, but the main avenues for books have such controls as DRM that I simply cannot get involved. The idea that a company can come into my kindle/whatever reader and take something from me is simply not something I can allow. I understand that you you buy a license to read something in most cases, but either sell it to me or don’t. This hybrid system they have leaves them with the final power and that has lost me as a customer for a lot of things.
I was grumbly before my years.
I’m just wondering whose translation of Plato they’re using. Because a lot of the best ones are decades from being PD.
Sorry, I can’t help but disagree on this.
The publisher committed a crime when they released the book.
Amazon committed one when they took it back.
First of all, Amazon doing an automated recall of the book is explicitly against the terms of service that came with the Kindle. (Terms which are, by the by, pretty stupid on their own.) But those terms explicitly say that when you purchase a book you have a perpetual non-exclusive right to the book on the device. Amazon gave lie to that in their own shrink wrap contract.
Obviously the Orwell books were stolen, but not by the people who purchased them. They were stolen by the publisher, who, should make restitution to the Orwell estate. Amazon violated their own contract with their users to cover the crimes of a third party, and they deserve all the scorn they receive for it.
This really does go to the larger point of DRM content though. People can tell you that you “own” it, but as long as a third party has the power to control your access to it, you don’t. Ask the people who bought the (ironically named) Microsoft Plays-for-Sure music. Microsoft shuts down the service and now all the music is unplayable to all the people who “own” it.
I have a Kindle DX, in addition to and iRex reader. The iRex is a nicer reader in a lot of ways, but I bought the Kindle because of the Amazon store. Much like iTMS and the iPod, having a good content purchase experience does make the device more compelling. However, I admit I feel a bit like a schmuck putting faith in Amazon, not to exist, but to not be an ass about their DRM. Given their history with IP abuse, I should have expected a shoe like this to drop. Maybe one day they can brow beat the publishers into dropping the ridiculous DRM like Apple eventually did (at least for music).
More to the point, though, I am left asking a few larger questions: First, why does Amazon “license” me the work rather than the publisher? Second, why are we so hung up on Mickey Mouse that Orwell isn’t public domain already anyway? Finally, why are people paying $1 for public domain works on Kindle when Amazon has 99% of the Guttenberg books free, and you can go to ManyBooks.net and get Kindle formatted versions for free? Seems like Amazon would want to ensure that PD works are free on the device in a clear fashion to enhance the clear utility of the device, especially to students.
Not having a Kindle or otherwise being a Kindle expert myself, I’m surprised by the “perpetual non-exclusive right to the book on the device” that cooper mentions. I rather expected the terms to be more license-like than purchase-like in the first place.
Cooper, the whole point is that Amazon’s contract refers only to books purchased from Amazon. These books were purchased from MobileReference, on consignment through Amazon. Slightly different, and covered by a different part of the contract.
Rachel, the ‘non-exclusive’ right to the book on the device covers things like making notes, highlighting text, etc. In that way the single copy stored on your device is not unlike a paper copy stored in your bookshelf.
In every other way the terms of use are very license-like.
I can’t help but wonder why this model, which has been fine for centuries when speaking of paper books is now all of a sudden so reprehensible to people. Unless it’s that thing I often run into in the tech side of things where people who are so accustomed to the Web expect everything electronic to be free.
Kat, it’s the same incomprehension I hit from students who cannot understand that people like me write encyclopedia articles and that the stuff they just plagiarized was not a group of free-range “facts” gathered by happenstance, but actually a work of interpretation done by somebody which they’ve stolen and misrepresented as their own intellectual creation.
However, remember Melville’s metaphor of “fast fish” and “loose fish” in Moby Dick? There was a similar contentious moment in the early and mid-19th century over how individual and corporate property rights were created in things and ideas that had been presumed to be the commons. Also, what (and who) could be sold (and by whom) was vigorously contested by everyone from the US Senate to the Harmonists of southern Indiana to runaway slaves. Moral arguments over real property (whether one should own certain types, whether certain types should be privately owned or stay as a public good open to all) had a momentous effect on arguments over who could possess an intellectual creation in a mechanical republic. There was even a strong undercurrent of thought that books and information should be free because the national genius required it. The idea of what can be property and under what terms is not as transhistorically uncontested as you make it sound and maybe it’s good to walk the bounds once in a while together just so we’re all sure where the fences are.
“the whole point is that Amazon’s contract refers only to books purchased from Amazon”
I think you missed my point: There are no books purchased from a publisher on Amazon. They are all purchased from Amazon. The Amazon publisher or blogger agreement is a limited use copyright transfer, and you “buy/license” all content from Amazon on the Kindle.
Amazon, much like a pawn shop, has the burden of due diligence on the sales and if they sold something that was stolen is is their, and MobileReference’s responsibility to make it right, not the consumers. The Kindle store isn’t a consignment store. It isn’t even like the iTMS. Amazon owns the redistribution rights on that store, and they have agreed to a contract with the consumer that they violated.
Also, “non-exclusive right” doesn’t mean that you can make notes, it means that Amazon will sell it to other people. You are not taking sole ownership of the copyright.
It’s typical FUD.
Amazon did not raid your Kindle.
Amazon removed the license to these books and removed them from their server. When your Kindle syncs with the Amazon store, it finds that the rights to that book have been revoked. Code on your kindle then manages the file removal. You technically allowed your Kindle to remove these books from its library when you sync’d into Amazon’s servers.
Analogies to B&N breaking in your house to remove an illegal book are FUD.
Part of owning the Kindle AND using the Amazon Store, is that this process is acceptable to you. You can have illegal books on your Kindle, you just can’t expect Amazon to manage this content for you.
What n0mad said.
N0mad:
I have never made such an analogy. What I am saying is that if the book was inappropriately licensed, it is a violation of Amazon’s own license to take it back from me.
Amazon made a decision to use a software-type license for books on the device. That was their choice. The implicit agreement is licensing books that way is indemnification of the user from IP issues. Amazon — not the publisher — licensed the book to me. If Microsoft sold copies of Windows with stolen code in it, or Oracle sold a DB with stolen code in it, they are responsible for making restitution. Changing their licensing servers to disable the software and then refunding the money is not an option. Once it is sold and licensed under those terms, they can’t take it back.
If Amazon wants it to work that way, they should changed their own contract with the user. Otherwise, they should eat the cost of a mediated settlement like anyone who sold software with stolen code would. But what is not “acceptable to [me]” is Amazon changing their own rules whenever it damn well suits them.
What a great thread. I’ve got lots of books on my Kindle that come from lots of different sources. I’ve purchased lots from Amazon and have praised the heck out of them for doing something Apple doesn’t do: they store my purchase history and allow me to re-download books if I for some reason want to; try doing that with a movie you’ve downloaded via the iTunes Store that you can’t access because your Apple computer and iPod both die at the same time. So, I love Amazon — got lots of blog posts over many years to prove it.
But Amazon is wrong on this one. They’ve admitted it and have said it won’t happen again. I don’t know why there are people defending them when even *they* have realized how onerous the idea of an entity being about to erase something you’ve purchased. This needs not analogy. This needs to comparison. This is wrong and Amazon screwed up. If the rightful owner of the copyright was harmed (and I believe they were), then Amazon is the party that needs to make them whole.
Zapping the property purchased in good faith by the customer is ridiculous. Had they done the right thing and worked things out with the copyright holder, they could have settled for a few thousand dollars. They’ve now had millions of dollars worth of exposure of how eBooks may not be that great a thing afterall — if “owning” something is what you want to do.
wow — sorry for typos. I should have said:
This needs no analogy. This needs no comparison.
Rex, it seems the more I read on this the more it looks like two conversations are being had in parallel. (Much like immigration or any other hot-button issue of late.)
There’s what is right conduct going forward in the world of new business models vis a vis the effect on future business.
There’s also what is right conduct in light of current legal restrictions on content.
I think this is a good conversation to have because it merges the two streams of thought. I’ll concede your point that Amazon didn’t act in good faith with their customers. I still maintain they acted in good faith with the rights holder.
For history’s sake, here’s a link to Jeff Bezos’ apology for Amazon’s screw-up: http://bit.ly/zdSjC
Quote:
“This is an apology for the way we previously handled illegally sold copies of 1984 and other novels on Kindle. Our ‘solution’ to the problem was stupid, thoughtless, and painfully out of line with our principles. It is wholly self-inflicted, and we deserve the criticism we’ve received. We will use the scar tissue from this painful mistake to help make better decisions going forward, ones that match our mission.”
What Jeff said.
The fact that Orwell’s books are under copyright is historically unprecedented; in neither the US nor the UK would they still be under copyright prior to the 1976/1995 (respectively) copyright extensions. To speak of a deal made for centuries is a little unrealistic, given that both duration and coverage of copyright have made huge jumps in the last year.
The reason “why this model, which has been fine for centuries when speaking of paper books is now all of a sudden so reprehensible to people” is the same reason why laws requiring you to have someone run in front of your car waving a flag are suddenly so reprehensible to most people. Very few people ever owned a printing press, and nobody was getting sued for copying out a story long-hand. The model wasn’t fine to the average person centuries; the model was irrelevant to them.
Blog is looken great!