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Comment by slightwinder | Hacker News Reader

It's really time for laws which forbid companies to terminate accounts and access to them if they met certain conditions like licencing digital properties. Sure, they can restrict them all they want, as long as a fair stance prevails und people are not ripped of their goods.

This strong difference in powers between companies and customers in the digital realm becomes more and more a serious problem. When people are stop buying digital goods or anything of certain types, just because they have no legal security, then it harms also companies themself. so it should be in their own interesst to support such things.

There was a time in Europe when a strong movement for digital rights existed, but to bad it somehow died down.

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What they need is a legally required termination procedure, so when the company shuts down, or if business with a user is terminated, it MUST supply the user with accessible digital goods equivalent to their library, or else the company is liable for goods not delivered.

That's on the right track, but it's not very helpful if the company is shutting down and out of money anyway.

Make the customers of digital goods first-in-line creditors. It's basically goods stolen from people, at the moment of shutting down - they should be first in line. Most companies don't shut down when they run out of their last dollar; Rather, they shut down when they have more liabilities than assets.

The result would be that traditional creditors will demand an escrow for that digital data before giving any money (or providing products before payment), to make sure that they are not bypassed -- which would be the desired result for everyone.

Agreed, I've long felt the same way about gift cards. And pensions, for that matter. (Which shouldn't be controversial, but is, at least for the Post Office.)

In most of Europe AFAIK, pensions are in even better status than first-in-line creditors: Money must be continuously deposited to a pension fund, not just an IOU.

The US migrated to the system of required pre-funding too, but not with pension priority over creditors. They get dumped on the PBGC.

>It's basically goods stolen from people, at the moment of shutting down - they should be first in line

No its not. You've only agreed to RENT a book for an unspecified amount of time. You never owned a thing, and thus nothing was stolen from you.

Ownership doesn't exist in the digital marketplace; if you really wanted to do something so stupid as to OWN a good, you'd pirate it.

Note that for goods like DVDs you're still only purchasing the right to access the data.. you didn't actually take ownership of anything more than the physical disk.

Hence, the OP has lost nothing they had... because they had nothing to begin with !

When I watch movies on Amazon Video, I. An choose “Buy” or “Rent”, not “rent for a day” vs. “rent until amazon decides I don’t deserve it”

Copyright is the specific rule under which I get the copy when I buy a DVD, not some random license written by the company producing the DVD. Fair use and all.

This word play would not be found funny in court (or at least shouldn’t be)

https://www.primevideo.com/help/ref=atv_hp_cnt?_encoding=UTF...

Viewing Period: Indefinite -- you may watch and re-watch your purchased videos as often as you want and as long as you want (subject to the limitations described in the Amazon Prime Video Terms of Use).

It's not copyright, as I understand it -- its terms of service.

"purchased" video. The "terms of use" limitation does not say "until we go bankrupt" or "until we decide to not let you for business reasons", and it does say "purchased videos". That has a well defined meaning, which contract weasel words can't change. Courts in Europe have ordered refunds for e.g. PS3 updates that removed Linux abilities - I'm sure the weasel legalese originally said Sony is allowed to do that.

There is a law of the land, and it is not overriden by an amazon webpage in general, even if it does in some US states.

If Amazon folds, how come my "purchased" video disappears with it?

Words have a meaning that cannot just be redefined at will with legalese. Try to pay someone salary, subject to the limitation that it is in negative dollars, and see how far that gets you in court.

So far, companies like Microsoft who shut down their DRM services have refunded those purchases ; Companies that folded did not. I suspect if Microsoft got to court without a refund, court would have ordered them to refund or give a DRM-free copy. Either way, it's clear that for Microsoft, the public relation + court costs outweighed the refund cost. My suggestion is to make that effectively law, so that not just microsoft (who stand to lose from this action) would actually consider it a-priori.

Or... just throwing this out here... they could start by selling actual digital goods which they advertise by a "BUY" button, and charge a service fee if you want them to keep a copy around in their cloud. That way you have your own copy, and the convenience of not having to keep track of where you stored those bits, and when the company inevitably dies/goes bankrupt/is sold/merges with Disney they stop charging the service fee and stop providing the service and you go back to keeping track of your own copy of the bits.

This is why I like places like Humble Bundle, you literally get a download link with PDFs (as well as other formats). It encourages piracy of course, but then again the moment somebody else could view your content on a device you don't control - it was already copy-able.

If the ebook publishers were motivated to, they would encode unique properties into the text of each download that uniquely identifies the transaction. Then if you find copies online you know who to chase.

The point is, give me my copy of the file, I don't want to be locked into your system.

This actually sounds like a neat idea from a theoretical perspective, but isn't it how cracks work, and how crack-generators evade that?

They meant for identification of leaker. But IMHO it's useless. Anybody could claim they had their laptop stolen.

Only if they have filed a police report...

Okay, not stolen, but attacked with malware.

Also you could just have two different accounts, buy the file, compare the two files and identify any differences, overwrite the differences with blanks/gibberish

Or just use OCR.

What good are rights when corporations can just have users sign them away by agreeing with some policy? They already make users waive a lot of rights, including the right to pursue legal action, the right to reverse engineer...

Regulate as utilities/infrastructure. Nobody likes the Ma Bell type of anti-trust because it feels like infringing on private property rights but regulating as utility or infrastructure is much widely accepted and palatable. However if you have poor management then you end up in the P&G situation with blame passing from one generation of management to another and no real improvements.

P&G or PG&E?

PG&E, typo.

That form of broken legal system is, as far as I know, peculiar to the USA. In most of the world, businesses aren't allowed to arbitrarily negate laws specifically created to protect their customers just by including some weasel words in the fine print. In fact, here in the UK and at least across much of Europe, businesses are required to actively inform their customers of various rights and other details, and failing to do so can have significant consequences.

The problem is most big technology companies seem to be located in the USA. Foreign laws are meaningless to them.

this would explain why the big technology companies are always upset when they get fined by the EU and then pay the fine.

USA system isn't broken that way. Unconscionable contracts are void. One famous example is CA's anti-non-compete law that created Silicon Valley.

USA also has mandated rights notifications.

There are specific absences of laws in certain particular cases.

> corporations can just have users sign them away by agreeing with some policy

These shrink wrap licences can be legislated away. Lots of EU countries have consumer protection legislation that explicitly forbids/invalidates such imbalanced or unexpected terms in the fine print for consumer-facing contracts -- or indeed invalidates shrink-wrap licence terms outright.

My country does the same thing but it's meaningless since companies are usually located in the USA.

Amazon is in USA but subject to EU jurisdiction when selling to EU residents.

As is often the case, a lot of these things are either illegal in the US too, or far less settled than the companies would have you believe. The companies stick them in the license clauses anyhow, because when you can just stick a severability clause [1] in there, why not grab things willy-nilly?

Plus a lot of people simply assume there's no recourse even when there in fact is ("the US is an anarchist wonderland where consumers have no protections at all" is a harmful and false meme, what we have is the widespread assumption that consumers have no protections), and of those who don't, who really wants to spend a ton of time in any sort of legal or arbitration resolution over 40 books, which almost certainly total far less than any possible legal or arbitration battle will cost?

The legal system, US, EU, or otherwise, doesn't have a good answer to when a company bones .01% of several million people to the tune of several hundred dollars, or bones its entire customer base for $1 or something. By the time you bust through their contract clauses against class action and even find everyone affected you've long since eaten up any value you're going to get from the lawsuit even if you win big and win punitive damages. Computers make it so much easier to do this kind of thing on the company's side, but they don't help anyone trying to fight it anywhere near as much. Very asymmetrical advantage for the companies to hit people like this at some scale.

[1]: https://www.investopedia.com/terms/s/severability.asp

> "the US is an anarchist wonderland where consumers have no protections at all" is a harmful and false meme, what we have is the widespread assumption that consumers have no protections

The biggest problem is that the US legal system is incredibly expensive. You can have justice, but only if you tens or hundreds of thousands of $$ to spend and prevail. In theory, everyone can get their day in court and (likely) enjoy reasonable protection. In practice, that's not happening.

Instead, what's happening is that such things wait for class action lawyers to take the case - which I would guess happens to less than one in a hundred cases in which a company utilizes this asymmetry.

Class action suits discourage widespread or egregious bad behavior by the powerful.

Yes, the lawyers rake in the money and the victims get virtually nothing but it created a market-driven method of enforcing rules; a immune to political whims.

Sadly arbitration clauses have become the norm, but I don’t know if they have merit with EULAs.

But I would like to see class action suits make a come-back.

Is the EU actually any better for this sort of case, though? In practice, not just in theory?

I believe the EU has different cost/benefit tradeoffs, but they're still not something to be done casually or easily by a consumer at this scale of damage. For instance, "loser pays" sounds great until you lose. Even if your obligations are statutorily limited it's still not something to take on over, let's say, Amazon restricting access to the 40 books you purchased, to pull an example from nowhere.

The damages in such a case are so low that it's difficult for any legal system to provide a reasonable mechanism for redress. Even if you valuate your time at the local minimum wage, even a small claims court is going to take more time than is worth it for one person. You'll probably be waiting in the courtroom for longer than the value of the books in question.

The real problem here isn't that the US is a consumer rights wasteland when it isn't; the real problem is the huge asymmetrical advantages companies have, in any jurisdiction, in screwing significant numbers of people just a little bit.

> Even if you valuate your time at the local minimum wage, even a small claims court is going to take more time than is worth it for one person.

Small claims court awarded "lost time" (in the loser pays) in the few cases I'm aware of. I know of several people who've taken a local retailer to court (Not quite Amazon, but think of e.g. New York's PC Richards and Sons size), and were made truly whole for a $200 case (that is, got their $200 back, and a few $100 more for effort). If these things happen in the US, I haven't heard of them.

> The real problem is the huge asymmetrical advantages companies have, in any jurisdiction, in screwing significant numbers of people just a little bit.

Yes, but situation in Europe is IMHO a bit better, both from the small-courts, binding-arbitration-instead-of-courts looked down upon, and much stronger regulation on rights, like fit-for-purpose, lemon laws, and even things like GDPR.

The bottom line is, regardless what the rules say, a person in Europe suffers, on average, much less than the power asymmetry - although they do pay for that upfront with higher prices (which also pay for other stuff like education and universal medical care - it's hard to untangle, but it's protection that likely isn't free).

In the US, we do have precedence for rights that can't be waived. The implied warranty of habitability is the first that comes to mind.

There are limits to contracts, including nontermimable or notransactable rights.

People need to talk with their wallet to get the message across.

There is nothing stopping people from buying a 'dumb' e-reader with internal storage where you load epub/pdf/rtf/txt files that you actually own or borrow from a library.

Does anyone make these? I know you can get a phone app, but all the e-ink I've seen has been kindle/nook/kobo. I'd happily buy one.

I still own an old Sony PRS e-reader which they can take from my cold dead hands!

AFAIK Most 'non-kindle' e-readers (even those with an online store), will still operate as a mass storage device if you connect them via USB to another machine.

You can just drop PDFs/Epubs on a Kobo, At least the one I have. It is a bit old now however.

I use my Kobo like it's "dumb"...but I generally have to use Calibre to convert epub to kpub for it to format right on the "page".

Where does a person with very little technological knowhow go to get these epub/pdf/rtf/txt files to somehow load onto this "dumb" e-reader they buy? What is a "dumb" e-reader? What software does a "dumb" e-reader need.

There is a reason that Kindle prevail, and it's not because of some conspiracy or a giant company. It's because it's easy, basically like going to Chapters or Barnes and Noble and walking out with a book. There is no similar avenue for "dumb" e-readers. They need to know several levels of skills to get it and it's a lot more difficult then clicking "Buy" and start reading.

Isn't Kindle a dumb e-reader? Or does it require Amazon account even to access simple PDFs?

You can use a Kindle by drag&drop PDF files onto it. If you use it like that, there is no need to connect it to the Wifi at all. I use my Kindle like this.

This is news to me, is that really true for all Kindle models? Can you really load files onto it as a connected storage device?

Can you point to any amazon docs explaining this? I was under the impression that this was the big caveat restriction with amazon.

https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/customerdocumentation/EM1...

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Another cool thing is Calibre recognizes the Kindle. :)

Yes, of course that's true for all Kindle models.

I bought the Kindle (model J9G29R) in 2019. When attached to the USB port, it acts like an USB mass storage device with FAT32 on it.

> This is news to me, is that really true for all Kindle models? Can you really load files onto it as a connected storage device?

Yes, all Kindles.

The remaining annoyance is that besides PDFs and a few other document file formats, the Kindles don't read standard EPUB format ebooks, only .mobi or .azw ebooks.

That was kinda sorta okay when the Kindle first came out (Amazon got .mobi through their acquisition of Mobipocket, and .azw is mostly the same format), as at the time practically every e-reader device had it's own proprietary format, but since then everyone has converged on the EPUB standard with Amazon the lone holdout.

Thankfully, Calibre can automatically convert ebooks of whatever format to .mobi when transferring from your library to a Kindle.

Like managing your own mp3 library, it's incredibly inconvenient compared to the cloud option. I've done it for years with music, and I'm very happy to just be able to stream whatever I want instead. Same with books.

As someone who doesn't have unlimited data, the number of services that make it very hard _not_ to use the cloud (including Apple, with their "I know you said put this on your computer, but we really didn't, and we'll just grab it from the cloud when you want to play it on your phone" junk) is extremely inconvenient.

> doesn't have unlimited data

Do people still have limited data plans in 2020?

I don't think it's reasonable to expect the market to fix this through customer boycotts. Customers just don't have the time or technical knowledge to understand the issues, and I don't think it's reasonable to expect them to.

In cases like this where there's a huge imbalance in power and technical knowledge between suppliers and users, I think it's perfectly reasonable for the government to legislate on the behalf of it's constituents to protect their interests.

I think at this point it's been clearly demonstrated that DRM is simply not necessary to protect functioning markets in digital goods. Apple showed this with iTunes, arguing forcefully for DRM free music downloads. I'm a gamer and there's a very vibrant and successful market in DRM free PDFs in the tabletop gaming industry. I'm no extremist, I don't object to all DRM in every case, but I think arbitrary lockouts like this are clearly wrong, and a right to DRM free copies of material you have bought if a service expires or closes is perfectly fair.

I don't think asking people to figure out how to manage files is a reasonable request. There's a growing number of people whose computer is a phone or tablet.

A little learning won't kill anyone. Not so long ago, managing files was a fundamental step in using a computer. It still is for the overwhelming number of office workers.

It won't kill anyone, but it shouldn't be necessary to buy a computer to manage your books. Like I said, a lot of people don't have a computer anymore.

I use a Kindle but just read .mobi files I put on it via Calibre.

>There was a time in Europe when a strong movement for digital rights existed, but to bad it somehow died down.

Did it? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirate_Party

Small parties attract protest voters who switch to something else later (or don't vote any more).

It probably mostly died down because the battle really was elsewhere than in Europe. The EU does try to regulate American tech companies though; how successfully, that's up for debate.

Those of us that support digital rights vote with our wallets. I would like to read ebooks. I don't have a source to BUY ebooks that I want. So I don't read them.

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