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Those keeping up to date will know of Amazon's 1984 (and Animal Farm) screw-up. What happened was that they allowed a third party to sell these Orwellian masterpieces though their Kindle e-Book store, but it turns out that these third party sellers had no rights to the books. And so refunds had to be issued and that might have been the end of the story.
What Amazon then did is extremely controversial. Through a feature built into the Kindle's DRM, they remotely erased all purchased copies of these books without the user's knowledge or permission. Yes, in this case, it might have been justified and the users are not too badly hurt as they've received a refund. But this shows exactly DRM is evil, according to ZDNet blogger Adrian Kingsley-Hughes, which I concur. This mass erasure of purchased content could one day be repeated, through features built into DRM, if the content owners one day decides that, well, maybe you need to pay for all your content again.
Sure, there would be threats of lawsuits and mass anger, but check your DRM license agreement and you might find that you've agreed to all of this. And why would content owners take back their content? Well, for one, if they ever lose the license themselves to distribute the content, then they are under legal obligation to stop the now unauthorised usage of the content, which after all, is what DRM was invented to prevent. Remember, with DRM, you might be effectively renting, not buying, if you don't check your usage agreement carefully. You have a limited license to use the content in the way specified by the content owners and protected through DRM.
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What Amazon then did is extremely controversial. Through a feature built into the Kindle's DRM, they remotely erased all purchased copies of these books without the user's knowledge or permission. Yes, in this case, it might have been justified and the users are not too badly hurt as they've received a refund. But this shows exactly DRM is evil, according to ZDNet blogger Adrian Kingsley-Hughes, which I concur. This mass erasure of purchased content could one day be repeated, through features built into DRM, if the content owners one day decides that, well, maybe you need to pay for all your content again.
Sure, there would be threats of lawsuits and mass anger, but check your DRM license agreement and you might find that you've agreed to all of this. And why would content owners take back their content? Well, for one, if they ever lose the license themselves to distribute the content, then they are under legal obligation to stop the now unauthorised usage of the content, which after all, is what DRM was invented to prevent. Remember, with DRM, you might be effectively renting, not buying, if you don't check your usage agreement carefully. You have a limited license to use the content in the way specified by the content owners and protected through DRM.
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