Microsoft announces will shut down eBook program, confiscate customer libraries
boingboing.net
boingboing.net
"Customers will receive refunds."
Folks don't want refunds, they want the item they paid for.
What other items should corporations be able to confiscate (with a refund!) without your consent? Everything they sold you? If so, what would you have left?
But legal or not, the effect is the same - they took your stuff. Unless we do something, this, and the violations of other rights you signed away, will become ever more commonplace. Right to a fair trial is already heavily restricted by omnipresent mandatory arbitration agreements. The fact that it's totally legal is of little comfort.
After I wrote my reply I reflected that in this case MS is actively, directly depriving you of access to the your content, a required component of theft, but IMO if a refund is issued before access is revoked then the requirmemts for theft still seem unmet. I also feel customers should be free to circumvent DRM technologies... which would allow the market to help mitigate this type of decieptful, manipulative licensing of content.
Seems pretty shitty to not refund the device purchases though.
In the end, did Nook Media have the only license to distribute some of these books? If not, the customers actually come out ahead here: they got to read the books for free, as many times as they wanted, as their leisure, since purchasing it.
They are now free to use that money to repurchase the same title at a competitor, if they like. Or a different title.
Having said that, a better way to make this right for customers would be to offer them either a refund OR a DRM-Free copy.
Though even then, it still raises one issue. Namely, how it seems basically every company now has realised that they get more money/power by endlessly renting things rather than selling them to the customer. Feels like ownership is being quickly killed off.
Personally, I never buy DRM encumbered books. I started buying from Fictionwise, then moved on the Weightless Books. I also only buy non-DRM books from Google Play.