My guess is that they either play nice with the publishing companies, or not at all.
Believe me, amazon hates this as much as you do. They had to credit a bunch of people's accounts for the books. Amazon is a company. One that spends money. The publisher is not the ONLY person that is seeing a taste of the $9.99. They're out the money they had to give to sprint (is it sprint that provides the connectivity? somebody correct me if I'm wrong), and every other cost that was covered by the money you spent on the book.
This was a horrible horrible move for all parties involved.
Sony is able to sell ebooks for its reader w/o being able to retroactively delete them. Why can't Amazon? I'm not sure they "hate it as much as I do". They may hate the fact that they're out of the refund money in this case, but love their ability to own the books on the customers' Kindles and be able to delete them at will.
I don't think it does. Where Amazon is the single largest online player in the book business, Sony is a small-scale newcomer. Where Amazon can exert an extraordinary amount of pressure on book publishers, Sony can exert bupkis. These differences are probably much more important to Amazon's ability to muster an impressive list of titles than the fact that it can withdraw books already purchased.
Amazon didn't have to put that ability in the Kindle. Without it, it'd still have a huge list of titles. Amazon wanted to have that kind of control.
(3) Amazon is a public company, hence it tries to maximize (1) and minimize (2)
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Hence, Amazon is really on the customers' side here when it comes to "buying" versus "refunding random books, rubbing hands together, and laughing manically". The only reason Amazon would want this kind of control is to extend it to publishers.
I don't see where you contradict anything I've said. Sure it wanted this kind of control to extend it to publishers. It preferred the interests of the publishers (its suppliers) to the interests of the readers (its customers).
How is that being on the customers' side again? No Kindle owner is interested in the publishers' being able to delete books of their device.
The stuff about maximizing profits is just a red herring. Any time any public company is criticized for anything it does there's always a chance someone'll pop out with "they're a public company, so they're just trying to maximize their profits". It's a sorta-meaningless universal excuse.
I don't see where you contradict anything I've said.
Well, a reply doesn't have to be a contradiction, but I didn't (and don't) agree with your implied assumptions. One being:
"they're a public company, so they're just trying to maximize their profits". It's a sorta-meaningless universal excuse
That's kind of like saying that gravity is a universal excuse for rocks falling on your head. They aren't excuses, they're physical/economic realities.
"Public corporations" are institutions in which decisions are made by individuals not just a contractually obliged to maximize shareholder value (meaning they'll be fired if they don't), but also a legal obligation to do so (meaning they can be sued and go to jail). Add to that the extraordinary competition for those positions and the over-abundance of people willing to take those jobs, and you'll get very simple behavior - profit maximization.
If I may, allow me (humbly) point out the fallacy in your thinking - you're personifying corporations. But they're nothing like people - they're economic entities defined and reacting to laws, just as moths are defined by physical laws.
Just a moth doesn't "know" any better than to fly towards light, corporations can't "know" any better than to maximize shareholder value. I don't mean that as a criticism of corporations, but rather of the ways in which their legal environment (copyright laws in particular) drives them to maximize those profits. Also worth criticizing: the ways in which the legal environment allows them to affect (via lobbying) it in ways which hurt the public good.
That's kind of like saying that gravity is a universal excuse for rocks falling on your head.
No, that's almost entirely unlike that. Gravity is well-understood and can be calculated and predicted. Predicting how a public company will behave based on the principle that it's going to maximize its profits is impossible. There's an enormous range of attitudes and behaviors that are used in practice and not considered to run afoul of this principle. This is why appealing to it is a sorta-meaningless universal excuse.
If you look at what actual public companies are doing, you will see all around you kinds of behavior that cannot be explained as maximizing the profits in any realistically predictable sort of way. Granted, for any such behavior you can come up with a plausible story about how it's somehow still going to contribute to profits by, for example, improving the company's public image, or betting on a long-shot breakthrough. But then, you can come up with such a story for virually any possible behavior, so it's, again, meaningless.
Some companies contribute to charity; others don't. Some companies spend huge amounts of money giving to their employees bonuses not mandated by contracts; others don't. Some companies (Yahoo) reject buyout offers based on higher-than-market evaluations - a decision that by definition robs shareholders of profit. Others don't. Some companies pay dividends. Others state upfront that they never will. Some companies follow established net standards when creating their applications. Others willfully break them. Some companies have a privacy policy for their users and stick to it; others have one and ignore it; others don't have one. Some public companies (Amazon, in fact) spend years racking up huge debt and ensuring they won't bring profit to their investors for many years to come. Some public companies (Microsoft) invest in a huge resource department that's poorly publicized (meaning little to no PR benefit) and almost certainly doesn't justify itself economically.
For all that, board takeovers for not maximizing profits, much less criminal persecutions, are very rare, because nearly any kind of behavior, including all enumerated above, can be justified with some sort of appeal to maximizing profits in some roundabout way or another, at some future or present point of time, according to some executive's judgement that's assumed to have been made in good faith. Yahoo's management had a good faith belief that Yahoo is really worth more than Microsoft was offering, even if the marker didn't recognize this. Spending lavishly on your employees is justified by claiming that otherwise the talent will leave and hurt profits; on the other hand, being a real cheapskate with your employees is justified by cutting costs and maximizing immediate profits. And so on and so on.
Given that just about any behavior can be explained as a way of maximizing profits, it's a useless explanation. It usually gets cited in defense of some objectionable behavior that can be seen to maximize profits in some easily-identifiable scope. The fact that other public companies (often) somehow manage to avoid doing the objectionable, or that this company (like just about any large company) routinely does things that hurt profits according to the same kind of simplistic explanation, is ignored. As I said in my original comment, it's a red herring.
You gave a lot of examples, but you missed the important one: Why would a publisher waive any of the rights the government (elected by the people) has granted them.
I couldn't agree more. I saw the refund email this morning but didn't put it together until I read about it on the web (it didn't mention deactivating the book). I checked my iPhone Kindle app and, sure enough, "1984" had been removed. I almost can't believe it. They reached into my device and turned off a book I bought from them.
I now know I'll never get a Kindle. Also I will not buy any more digital books from Amazon. It's a shame. I liked it.
I don't know whether it is illegal. I am trying to figure out if this violates their TOS:
Upon your payment of the applicable fees set by Amazon, Amazon grants you 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"
Is that "or" a get-out clause? Because the first part seems to quite definitively rule out what they did.
The most logical reading of the or is that you are allowed to display the content as many times as you want, and those displays may either be on the screen or in another manner that has been authorized by Amazon.
That said, I'm sure their lawyers will be able to spin it as meaning that they grant you the right to keep the copy as authorized by them.
When you "purchase a book" from the kindle store, all you are actually purchasing is a license to view the book that is bound by amazon's terms of use.
Criminally illegal, no. But that leaves open civil suits, which are sure to come.
1) You can sue anyone for anything. The US does not have a "loser pays" rule, though frivolous lawsuits can include attorney's fees.
2) Class action lawsuits are very profitable for lawyers when they win. They need to convince a jury of 12 people who couldn't get out of jury duty that "Big Corporation" was wrong. They get a percentage of the total judgment.
My guess is that some lawyer will pick this one up. They'll sue Amazon based on "common sense" and Amazon will realize that a jury isn't going separate a "book" from an "e-book". The plaintiff's lawyers will equate it to removing a book from your bookshelf in your house.
Amazon will argue commas in their TOS or Amazon will settle. On top of it all, Amazon demonstrates why I purchased a netbook instead of a Kindle for my e-book reading pleasure ... and why I don't buy e-books that I can't remove the DRM from.
[edit] since I can't edit the original due to replies.
I still think they stand a good chance of a class action lawsuit. The likelihood of it succeeding is less since it sounds like the issue relates to "who really owned the copyright" and they had to take down the content due to that ambiguity or fraud.
I concur - bonehead handling by Amazon perhaps, Exhibit A to why the copyright laws might need reforming, but not likely to lead to legal liabilities for Amazon given that they refunded everybody's payments.
Amazon needs to make its licensing policies clear up front and not bury them in fine print.
I may not like it when I only get a license that might be yanked, but I'll be a lot less upset about it the day it is yanked if I did the deal with open eyes at the start.
Though Amazon may be technically correct, it deserves the drubbing it is getting by failing to make its DRM policies clear up front to its customers.
It obviously obscured this issue to ensure that the issue would not harm Kindle sales. Now that this bomb has exploded, Kindle sales will be hurt anyway.
They have lost it today, utterly and likely irredeemably. There is no excuse for taking back what a customer has already purchased. None.
And that they did so without even asking the customer? It should be considered outright criminal.