On Thursday, some Amazon.com customers discovered that e-books they had bought by George Orwell had disappeared from their Kindle e-readers.
It wasn’t a scene from Orwell’s dystopian classic, “Nineteen Eighty-Four.” The customers reported on Amazon’s discussion boards that Amazon refunded them the cost of that book as well “Animal Farm,” and used its “Whispernet” wireless access to their Kindles to wipe away the e-books. Some were surprised and upset, to put it mildly.
The issue, says Amazon spokesman Drew Herdener, is that the Orwell books had been added to the company’s catalog using a self-service platform by a third party that did not actually have rights to sell the books. “When we were notified of this by the rights holder, we removed the illegal copies from our systems and from customers’ devices, and refunded customers,” he said.
Herdener didn’t say why the supplier made the mistake. But it could stem from the fact that the copyright for the Orwell classics has lapsed in some countries but not others, such as the United States.
In response to the customer reaction, Amazon says it will take a different approach if something like this happens again. “We are changing our systems so that in the future we will not remove books from customers’ devices in these circumstances,” said Herdener.
Competitor Sony did not miss a chance to point out that sales are “final” on its Reader. “Sony has never remotely deleted a downloaded title,” a representative for the company said. (Of course, since the Sony Reader device doesn’t have wireless access, it would have to be plugged into a computer in order for the company to gain access.)
Whether it occurs again or note, the incident raises a question: can a company legally take back such a purchase? “In essence, Kindle is licensing you access to the book,” said Peter Brantley, director of the San Francisco-based Internet Archive, a non-profit digital library. “It is a purchase, but you are actually not owning the book in the same way that you go to the book store and own it.”
Books in the real world are covered by a notion of copyright called the “first sale” doctrine, which allows a purchaser to do pretty much whatever he or she wants with the book–including reselling it or lending it to a friend.
But digital books–especially if they’re sold as part of access to a networked system such as Amazon’s Kindle Store and Google’s online books collection–don’t necessarily fall under those same rules. “We have not matured our understanding of copyright to work in a digital environment in way that provides a set of protections and meets people’s expectations for how we use digital content,” said Brantley.