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copyright “takedown” notices for the material that its customers
post on its site, discarding ridiculous claims rather than blindly
acting on every single notice, no matter how frivolous.
But for all that, it has to be said: Whenever Amazon tries to
sell a digital download, it turns into one of the dumbest compa-
nies on the Web.
Take the Kindle, the $400 handheld ebook reader that Amazon
shipped recently, to vast, ringing indifference.
The device is cute enough — in a clumsy, overpriced, genera-
tion-one kind of way — but the early adopter community recoiled
in horror at the terms of service and anti-copying technology
that infected it. Ebooks that you buy through the Kindle can’t be
lent or resold (remember, “When someone buys a book, they are
also buying the right to resell that book... Everyone understands
this.”)
Mark Pilgrim’s “The Future of Reading” enumerates five other
Kindle showstoppers: Amazon can change your ebooks without
notifying you or getting your permission; and if you violate any
of the “agreement,” it can delete your ebooks, even if you’ve paid
for them, and you get no appeal.
It’s not just the Kindle, either. Amazon Unbox, the semi-abor-
tive video download service, shipped with terms of service that
included your granting permission for Amazon to install any soft-
ware on your computer, to spy on you, to delete your videos, to
delete any other file on your hard drive, to deny you access to
your movies if you lose them in a crash. This comes from the com-
pany that will cheerfully ship you a replacement DVD if you email
them and tell them that the one you just bought never turned up
in the post.
Even Amazon’s much-vaunted MP3 store comes with terms of
service that prevent lending and reselling.
I am mystified by this. Amazon is the kind of company that
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