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.
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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:
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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. Account status should not affect any customer's ability to access their library." (Amazon loves copying-and-pasting, it seems.) Our follow up question - "Why wasn't told why her account was cancelled?" - hasn't been answered yet.Īnd it probably won't be. When we reached out to the company Monday, their PR representative would only send us a canned response they'd dropped into their customer forum: "We would like to clarify our policy on this topic. She's still waiting on her replacement Kindle, but in the meantime has access to her library through the Kindle iOS app on her iPad.īut Amazon doesn't get off the hook so easily. Now just to spoil the story, I'll skip to the happy ending for Nygaard: After taking her story public, Amazon saw the error of their ways and restored her Kindle library.
Per our Conditions of Use which state in part: .uk and its affiliates reserve the right to refuse service, terminate accounts, remove or edit content, or cancel orders at their sole discretion.Please know that any attempt to open a new account will meet with the same action. Instead, Murphy would only pass on this shrilly authoritarian boilerplate: What other account? Murphy wouldn't share that, either. 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.
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"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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