hello @aleghart,

you bring some very good points.

on 1, just because every company is doing it it doesn't mean it is ok. I *do* bash a company, even if is HP, if I am not allowed to use something I bought from them. This is another case where customers get punished by a company too afraid of piracy.

you may have a point w/ your comment on #2. Your provide a good example.

Thanks for your comments,

So...people steal. It's animal in nature. Why work hard for something when you can steal it? Civilization and moral values are supposed to overcome this tempatation...but it doesn't. Many of us walk up to the roadkill and take a big ol' bite, like vultures or hyenas. We don't care how it got there or who started it....we just want our share without having to do the work.

With copyright, this animalistic behavior is used in court. If you fail to defend yourself, it is equal to rolling over and giving up. You forfeit your rights, and anyone may steal a piece. The burden of protection falls upon the entity seeking protection. If you don't defend yourself physically, with technology, with money, with lawyers, and with investigators....you give up your rights to protection under the law.

If the crime were grand theft, assault, rape, or murder, those legal requirements would sould absurd and insulting. "You didn't do a good enough job defending yourself against the attacker, so he won't go to jail, and the police will no longer respond to your cries for help."

In essence, the software companies must find their own ways to defend themselves. Amazon faces financial penalty and loss of future revenue by selling copyrighted material without the permission of the copyright holder.

The valid copyright holder should (even must) seek injunction, corrective action, prohibition of future activity, compensation for loss, and punitive damages.

Amazon jumped the gun to make corrective actions, most assuredly to avoid punitive damages and possible loss of porfolio content by unhappy copyright holders (namely the publishing houses that license the content).

Was it fair to consumers? Hard to say. It was fair under the law. It wasn't great customer service. Definitely not fair in terms of privacy concerns. (If a librarian snuck into my house in the middle of the night to remove a book that was not properly checked out, I'd likely _not_ be pleased.)

At the very least, consider this spin: the content was sold illegally. Obviously by a supplier with intent to profit by illegal means. What is the chance that the software is safe?

In the case of operating systems, applications, utilities, etc. on the internet: there are no safe copies unless it is licensed and acquired directly from the publisher. Anything else has a great risk of being tampered with.

A pre-emptive removal or disabling of the content _should_ have been to protect both the consumer and Amazon. By the way, possession of stolen goods is a crime. So, if this were physical property, not only would you have to surrender it to the authorities, but you'd be facing charges yourself.

Bad PR decisions. It could have waited a day and taken $50K in consulting fees to come to a much better end.

I think a lot of the indignation (and confusion about customer rights v. copyright) comes from the lack of physical property and the lack of a definitive authority having jurisdiction.

If the police showed up on my doorstep with a representative from the State Department demanding my surrender of a box of contraband Cuban cigars...I'd probably give them up. I thought they were Dominican, paid good money for them. But I wouldn't argue that they were my private stash, and could not be touched. (I _don't_ have any cigars by the way...just sounded more plausible than North Korean weaponized plutonium.)

Heck, we're still not settled on making cassette tapes off of 33-1/3 albums. Can I, or can't I? Can I charge for the tape cost?

By the time we get any definitive judgements and defense/offensive against the crimes...things get all Napster and Pirate Bay. We'll be good. We'll find another way to make money...and let somebody else find a better loophole from which to steal.

I would definitely demand that Amazon replace the title at their own expense. They have liability for not vetting the seller. No different than if they let someone sell Xerox copies of a book, then demanded return. Fine...if you give me a legit copy of the book. Otherwise, bugger off.

Not much cheaper than a Kindle, but no connectivity. It's a slave to another device.
You have to hook it up to a "PC", nothing specific. Apparently mounts like a portable storage device.

Then, the company recommends download of free stuff found off the internet in TXT or DOC format. Calls it an "unlimited" supply.

Sounds like those cheap MP3/multi-media players that are focused on doing everything on the cheap. Not so much on the user experience.

Like how they consulted with opthamologists to determine that a backlight would be bad...and that's why they eliminated it. Not so they could cut significant dollars of manufacturing, repairs, battery size, QC, warranty repairs, etc.

Not sure I agree with the statement about VGA screen having a faster refresh rate than eInk, thus better for your eyes. Nothing's supposed to be moving except the lame page-turning animations. 16-shades of grey mandates refresh to keep the settings of the pixels in an LCD. Black-and-white eInk is supposed to be a static binary display.

Without publisher buy-in, consumers will not have access to new titles (unless they're pirated and distribued on the internet). The big appeal of Kindle is not reading dictionaries from the turn of the century. Or old copies of the Bible. Or Aesop's Fables, which are incredibly boring without modern interpretation.

Maybe the pirated content is the direction they're pointing. From their FAQ:

"Should you need any assistance finding an e-book online, please feel free to contact us and we will be glad to help you out. Our team will search, find, and send the link of that book directly to you."

On the other hand, you might be able to find free new ebooks at smashwords.com, scribd.com, manybooks.net, feedbooks.com, fictionpress.com, or memoware.com, or on several other sites.