TECHdodo

All your base books are belong to us.

Again, the problems with Digital Rights Management rear their ugly heads. No one can demonstrate the problems with DRM more than those who control it. This time, it is Amazon and their Kindle again.

Apparently, Amazon sold books to their customers that they did not have a legal right to sell. They blame it on a third party, but they made the sale, so they are just as responsible. When the owner of the rights to the books complained that illegal copies of their works were being sold through Amazon, Amazon deleted them. What they did after the fact though is what shows the problems with Digital Rights Management. They didn’t just stop offering the book for sale. They deleted copies they had already sold. People who had purchased the book; people who paid for it in good faith and thought they owned it, discovered one day that the book was gone. Wiped off their Kindle as if they had never purchased it, never paid money for it, never negotiated a transaction or transfer of ownership. What does this mean? It quite simply means they didn’t own it. If they owned it, then they would have been able to refuse to return it. They did not get that option. This isn’t the first time Amazon has made changes to what people have purchased after the fact.

That is the problem with Digital Rights Management. I have said it before, and I will say it again. It isn’t the first time something like this has happened, and it surely won’t be the last. Google did something similar when they decided to get out of the video business. Anyone who buys material protected by DRM is really only leasing it as long as the company who “sold” it to them allows them to use it. If for some reason they change their mind about a sale they made, or decide for some reason that they don’t want you to own it anymore, they can simply erase it or disable it, then refund your original purchase price (if they are still in business) and that is that.

There are a lot of problems with the way this was handled. First, Amazon never should have allowed the book to be sold in the first place. They dropped the ball when they allowed a company who didn’t have legal rights to a work to sell it through their store. Second, once they were notified of the infringement, they certainly should have removed it from being available for purchase, but they shouldn’t have simply deleted it from the devices of people who already purchased it with no prior notice and thought a refund for the original purchase price would take care of things. Some of the books in question are still available for purchase from Amazon as legitimate offerings, or at least you hope it is legitimate. How do you tell the difference as a consumer?

What Amazon could have done to make this a little more palatable would have been to have offered a refund, or a replacement. All of the books in question are still available for sale from Amazon in some form. Is it their customer’s fault that Amazon didn’t check the legality of what they were selling and sold them a book they didn’t have the right to sell? No, it is not. Amazon should offer them a replacement of the book they purchased. If they have a legal electronic version available for sale through their store, any customer who bought the questionable version from Amazon should be offered the legitimate version at no extra charge. It is the absolute least they could do. For books where there is no legitimate electronic version, they should offer a hard copy version to be shipped to them for free. If they don’t want either of these two options, then they should be offered a refund of the original purchase price. It was Amazon’s mistake, not their customer’s, and Amazon should be the one that makes good. If they want to try to recoup the cost of doing that from the part who originally sold the illegitimate copy, then that is something they should work out with them, not their customers.