Teen sues Amazon: The Kindle ate my homework
A 17-year-old from Michigan has filed a lawsuit against e-commerce powerhouse Amazon after it deleted a book he had purchased for his Kindle device.
The high school student, Justin D. Gawronski, filed suit in a Seattle court along with California resident Antoine J. Bruguier, and they are seeking class action status.
Amazon forcibly (and ironically) recalled copies of George Orwell's "1984" and "Animal Farm" earlier this month after it was revealed that they were unauthorized. Justin Gawronski's complaint alleges that he was reading "1984" as summer reading for an advanced-placement class and had to turn in "reflections" on each hundred pages. With the loss of the digital book, Gawronski claims his page count was thrown off and his notes were "rendered useless because they no longer referenced the relevant parts of the book."
Amazon has declined to comment on the lawsuit, which appears was first reported late Thursday by The Wall Street Journal's Digits blog.
While buyers received refunds for the recalled copies of the Orwell books, the fact that no advance notice was given threw many customers off and created an uproar against Amazon. The lawsuit, for one, alleges that Amazon did not make it clear enough to customers that remote book deletions were a possibility. It also alleges, as do critics, that the company violated its own terms of use.
"The power to delete your books, movies, and music remotely is a power no one should have," the lawsuit quoted Slate's Farhad Manjoo as saying in an opinion piece following the book deletions.
Amazon founder Jeff Bezos put out a public apology shortly after the fiasco unfolded, but it's not clear how the company's policies will (or won't) change in the future.
Caroline McCarthy, a CNET News staff writer, is a downtown Manhattanite happily addicted to social-media tools and restaurant blogs. Her pre-CNET resume includes interning at an IT security firm and brewing cappuccinos. E-mail Caroline. 
Instead of the TV watching you, your PC or laptop watches you for the government via the Internet.
In the end, they are only doing what Wal-Mart and Microsoft have already accomplished with the masses. Total domination through the promise of cheaper products that are as "good" as their competition.
For me - I'll stick with books printed on dead trees.
Wal-Mart doesn't show up at your door, take back the items you just purchased and say "oops, we weren't supposed to sell that".
So to say that Amazon is "only doing what Wal-Mart and Microsoft have already accomplished" is complete B.S.
Is that bad? Possibly.
WalMart has driven thousands of small businesses under by providing quality service, then when no one was looking switching it with crap when their major competition was gone or reduced.
Microsoft just crushes or kills off the competition, then rolls of Vista to replace XP.
And Amazon with its Kindle?
Wait and see.
I'm sure I could buy a storage room full of 1984 books for what it would cost to hire a lawyer. The time and effort this kid put into a law suit, he could have bought the real book, read it, finished his report and have a lot of time, money and life left over.
Are you suggesting that companies purposely try to fail so that they don't dominate? That's stupid. Where is that attitutude going to end? What next?...athletic events where everyone comes in for a tie?
You see this all the time, people who lack the initiative or skill to win so instead they try to make the winner look like a bad guy. It's a pathetic tactic use by many. (Apple/Linux users use it against Microsoft, businesses use it against Wal-Mart, etc.) Ultimately these are all just losing attitudes.
How would you like it of somebody from a book store showed up at your door and took the book you were reading right out of your hand? What else are they able to delete?
The Kindle is a POS and once again, anyone that uses it is a sucker. How people can relinquish control over their information to someone else is completely bizarre, not to mention being restricted as to where they can get their reading material.
If this kid made a mistake, it was in purchasing the Kindle and dealing with Amazon in the first place. However, since Amazon breached their trust they deserve a nice shiny new lawsuit.
ebook readers are a great idea, letting the company that makes the reader have delete control over the gadget is just plane stupid. And buying a reader that won't let you download your books from wherever you want is even stupider.
I expect the vast majority of notes will be impossible to reconstruct without him remembering why he placed the note (but that's why you make a note in the first place).
First of all, the lawsuit is not just about the notes. It argues (convincingly) that the book deletion itself was illegal.
Second, matching the notes up is basically impossible. Amazon did the near-equivalent of pulling 100's of post-it annotations off of a paperback, then throwing them on the floor. Yes, you still have all the text, but it doesn't make any sense in isolation.
The lawsuit is about the theft of material from his reading device. How, why and the consequences are not the issue.
Oh? So I take it, then, that you wouldn't mind my logging into your personal computer and poking around for files that violate copyright and deleting them without your knowledge or consent?
Please do feel free to share your IP, username, and password and I'll take you up on that.
Once the book was gone the kid has an obligation to fix his problems in a reasonable time frame. You can't just make something worse and expect Amazon to fix it too. This is available from project gutenberg or at least the Austrailian version. Not sure about the US version.
when you pluck down money to buy a digital product it should be yours to keep or until they refund your money. The kid is not being a punk but he is being punked.
The government has a watch list of books to keep an eye on if read or bought.
Ebooks makes their job harder unless it has DRM in it.
D~W
The kid was right when he said: "The power to delete your books, movies, and music remotely is a power no one should have"
Hope he wins.
What Amazon should have done is settle with the copyright holder and pay him for however many copies of the unauthorized book it sold. It is an Amazon supply chain, not and end user liability.
I want this to sound the death knell for DRM in ebooks in the same way that Sony's rootkit did in music. DRM is a blight that only punishes people who are honest -- the bitter fact is that if these customers had pirated a copy of 1984 from an illicit site instead of purchasing it in good faith, nobody would have deleted their file from their devices.
In Short:
Amazon.com had a major issue to face, They did, Made the correct decision, and will now come out on top. Plain and simple. It's not right to have your property revoked. But, it's unlawful to sell Unauthorized Copies of Materials, Regardless of the Material. eBay.com Removes THOUSANDS of listings per week to fight the issue. Amazon.com will more than likely head towards the same direction soon and cut off the violators before they can sell fraudulent items.
But hey, I buy from china all the time. Why? Because it's MUCH cheaper and it's the same quality for most things. A Book is a Book and a DVD is a DVD!! Costs the same to produce, but, sadly enough we as Americans are greedy and sell things at ridiculous overhead. So I just join in and buy copies at less expensive rates :c)....Best part is, Copies from China are not illegal here ;c) lol. Sort of like, Diplomatic Immunity. It's good stuff too know..
That's not true. As cerebral_but_dull says, the /government/ can confiscate copyrighted works /with/ a court order. However, that's a far cry from a private company doing so without a court order, violating their own TOS (which happened here).
That by itself still strikes me as shaky grounds for a lawsuit, but the foundation -- that Amazon deleted his personal files without permission -- is rock solid.
If nothing else, this story is going to make for a great effing report on 1984 for his AP English class.
Of course there won't be any precedent, Amazon will settle to avoid it.
But we do have to consider why Amazon did what they did. I'm sure they did not intend to act as big brother. They were afraid of a lawsuit from the copyright owner against them. But someone somewhere should have stopped for a second and thought about what they're doing and how it will be perceived. And of all things, 1984? Come on, you're just setting yourself up.
Justice aside, the ONLY people to profit from this will be lawyers. Kindle users will get nothing, no laws will be changed, but we'll see more draconian and restrictive DRM and EULAs. If they didn't pull the book, rest assured, perhaps even the same set of lawyers would be filing the same lawsuit against Amazon, instead this time for copyright infringement.
The vast majority of the trolls here have never used a kindle or even read a large amount of text in an online format. So let me clarify-
Each page is one kindle screen. One kindle screen is not the same size as all book pages. If you change the font size the size of your pages changes. Notes in kindle reference the the section of text you had connected them to. If you lose the book, the notes become nothing more than a mass of marker highlighs and sticky notes sitting on the ground. They no longer have any use whatsoever.
To those who laugh at americans for our proclivity to legal action-
If you dont use the law system you have to settle arguments that would otherwise go unended, then there is no purpose in the system at all. You're really showing that you have no faith in your own law systems.
On to my opinion-
The word "ironic" in the original article fits perfectly. At http://www.wonderhowto.com/how-to/video/how-to-use-amazon-kindle-ebook-reader-144717/view/ you can view a video that helps to understand the basic ins and outs of kindle use but the closing message rings true-"So not only is Kindle changing where, when, and what you read; it's also changing how you read." Sounds like information control to me. Farenheit 451 anyone?
- by leofoss August 1, 2009 8:07 AM PDT
- It is also ironic that here in Canada, where there no longer is a copyright on '1984', the Kindle also does not have any wireless connection to the Amazon store. You have to use your computer to download Kindle books. So in Canada it is impossible for Amazon to delete your book from your Kindle.
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