I’ve talked in the past about why DRM is horrible, including personal experience with having products I’ve purchased simply stop working because the company I bought them from decided I no longer had a right to them.
Here’s another case in point: A woman had her Amazon account wiped because Amazon found that it was “directly related” to another account that had violated Amazon’s policies in the past. What policies? They won’t say. What account? They won’t say. How did they conclude that the account was “directly related” to her? They won’t say.
What they will do, however, is delete every book she’s ever purchased from her Kindle.
I own a Kindle DX. I like it a lot. I recommend it to people who are looking for a PDF-friendly e-reader. But this is why I don’t buy e-books from Amazon unless they’re DRM-free. (And even then, I make sure to archive a copy on my local hard drive where Amazon can’t capriciously delete it at their whim.)
As more and more traditionally analog content becomes digital, the long con of DRM will become increasingly urgent. As a consumer, you need to be aware of it. And you should be making your purchasing decisions accordingly: Don’t reward corporations that think they have a right to control your personal property just because they sold it to you.
Note: from what I read, they didn’t “delete every book… from her Kindle.” She had gotten a replacement Kindle due to striping on the screen, and found she was unable to upload her library to the new device. Same result, perhaps, but let’s keep the story straight; the truth is a little less invasive than you made it sound and we don’t want the big corporations to be able to nitpick misconceptions on our side to make it seem like we have no argument.
When I saw the story of Amazon unloading books from readers (1984 no less!) I decided I’d stick to paper. Plus, all my books are EMP hardened!
It’s worth taking a look at the Cory Doctorow/Boing Boing article – it seems to be a little more complex than you’re saying: Confanity – but the Kindle swap is probably at the core of it. The real problem is the way their customer service people then handled it.
It does seem that it’s been resolved now – although with no explanation…
The problem occuring during a device swap is not really as reassuring as it looks. If one has hundreds of ebooks (easy to do, by the way) then having the battery in a device (or the hard drive) wear out is a loss not just of the device (which is a couple of hundred bucks) but could cost you all of the media on it.
That’s not a favorable property. I do a lot of dropbox storage just because of issues like this for computer files.
@Confanity: I checked out the follow-up stories that have been posted, and it looks like you’re in error. Although Linn Nygaard had requested a replacement device, that device was apparently never shipped. Her titles were, in fact, wiped off of her original Kindle when her account was closed.
It’s possible that her account was flagged due to the activity of the person she gave her original Kindle to. It’s possible it was flagged because she lives in Norway and was purchasing digital books from the UK store. It’s possible that her account was flagged because this would have been the second time she replaced a faulty Kindle. (There were stories a year or so back about people who were having their accounts closed because they made “too many returns”. Amazon has a long history of this, but it only became insidious when closing the account bricked the Kindle associated with it.)
But, again, we don’t really know: Because Amazon isn’t saying.
And while I would totally support Amazon’s right to close her account for any of the reasons above (they’re under no mandate to do business with her), the problem here comes back to the DRM and the unacceptable realities that occur when you give a company control over your personal property just because they sold it to you.
That’s true whether we’re talking about MSN Music shutting down and taking all your music with it. Or EA shutting down its activation servers. Or Steam making it impossible to play games on machines that used to play them just fine. Or Toyota being able to remotely prevent you from starting your car because they don’t want to maintain the ignition activation servers.
(The last of those isn’t real. But if you’re OK with everything else in that paragraph, it follows logically you should be OK with that, too. Think about it.)
Amazon now claims that this shouldn’t have happened. But it did. And the fact that they even have the ability to do it in the first place should raise huge red flags for anyone thinking that DRM is acceptable in any way.
I am totally on board with your opinion of drm. I downloaded all of the tracks from a hard to find CD back in 2002 from yahoo music. 6 years later I find out that yahoo music no longer exists and I have a pile of dead files that don’t work. These days I refuse to pay for digital objects… Period! All my RP books are paper, I only play retro video games anyway and I’m mostly a board gamer. The physical things I but are MINE and the manufacturer can’t do anything about it
Dang, if my fact-checking was incorrect, that’s embarrassing. Thanks.
I think we’re all in agreement, at least, that licensing stuff like that to people is kind of an underhanded move, and letting them think they’re actually buying it is even worse. What happened to the importance of customer satisfaction, or at least customers not feeling like they got ripped off for hundreds of dollars?
“or at least customers not feeling like they got ripped off for hundreds of dollars”
I think the larger issue is that your property can be dependent on the survival of the company that sold it. If Amazon went out of business, how do we know Kindle libraries will stay viable? Will they outlast the device?
PDFs are at least portable between platforms . . .
That said, I have a kindle library that is a trade-off between storage space and posterity. But I never assume that the books on it are permanent.
I’m strongly against DRM as well. I used to be a computer game fanatic; my favorites were Half-Life and its offshoots (TFC, CS, DoD especially) and Starcraft: Broodwar. Since both Blizzard and Valve have made the moves all but completely to DRM-style business I have stopped supporting or purchasing their products that I loved and devoted a huge proportion of my hobby time to. Nowadays all my hobbies involve things that are either completely free, or things that if paid for are physically present in my home. Bits of software that can vanish at any instant or rely entirely upon constant support from their sellers in perpetuity to function at all do not get a penny from me.
Their loss is WotC and Games Workshop’s gain.