![]() As Greenstein explained in an email to NBC News, it's not all completely settled:Īll sales through Apple and other online retailers are subject to terms of use that set forth the conditions of sale. I was curious if there was any merit to my idea of attempting to hold retailers to these "Truth in Buttons" terms, so I asked Intellectual Property attorney Seth Greenstein, who wrote about about case law for reselling e-books a couple years back, if the notion held water. And my Kindle screen was broken so the fact that the books were still there didn't help me much." ![]() Murphy, I could not log in to my account from Web or iPhone. (It is worth noting that despite Amazon's stated policy that customers can still access their previously purchased Kindle library even if their account is suspended, Nygaard couldn't download her books to a new device because her account was suspended.Īs she explained to us, "Before I started emailing Mr. But you'd still be pretty angry if and when it happens to you. You could call Nygaard's experience a tempest in a teapot, a matter of a few hundred dollars worth of goods that, after a little public outcry, were fixed without issue. Those long End User License Agreements you have to read before you use a new piece of software? Those are are legally binding, because you've clicked a button labeled "Agree." But for some reason, online retailers can label their buttons "Buy" when they actually mean "Rent," and there's nothing we can do about it save filing a lawsuit. Nor pretty much everything you "Buy" online that doesn't get shipped to your home in a cardboard box. Just last year, the Supreme Court ruled that the first-sale doctrine does not apply to software - or e-books. But we're not buying anything, we're licensing it. The core issue might actually be a simple matter of semantics: when we click a digital button that is labelled "Buy," we expect that we're actually buying something. This fine print will always have a clause that says you are a mere tenant farmer of your books, and not their owner, and your right to carry around your "purchases" (which are really conditional licenses, despite misleading buttons labeled with words like "Buy this with one click" - I suppose "Conditionally license this with one click" is deemed too cumbersome for a button) can be revoked without notice or explanation (or, notably, refund) at any time. ![]() ![]() Instead, we rent them, or hold them in a sort of long-term lease, the terms of which are brokered and policed exclusively by the leaseholder.Īs Boing Boing's Cory Doctorow put it in a blog post yesterday: But it serves as a bitter reminder that we don't ever truly own the digital goods and software we buy online. Nygaard's little dust-up with Amazon isn't, in and of itself, a big deal. What other account? Murphy wouldn't share that, either.Īnd it probably won't be. A man named Michael Murphy with Amazon UK's "Executive Customer Relations" told Nygaard her account had been determined to be "directly related to another which has been previously closed for abuse of our policies." Which policies? He wouldn't say. That's when things took a Kafkaesque turn ( as documented by her friend, Martin Bekkelund, on his blog). Those friendly phone-based customer support folks couldn't access Nygaard's account either, and she was passed on to "account specialists" who only communicated via email. Nygaard was pleased with Amazon's prompt service, she told us, even though this was her second Kindle to fall victim to "stripes" on the ePaper screen.īut when Nygaard attempted to log into her Amazon account the next day, her account was suspended - and with it access to her library of 43 books. (I live in Norway, but have a friend who lives in London.)" They could only ship the replacement to UK because it was originally purchased there, and I told them I would find an address the next day. "Someone immediately found the Kindle in the system and told me they would replace it free of charge. "Two weeks ago my Kindle started showing stripes on the screen and I contacted Amazon support," Nygaard told NBC News.
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