Amazon Won’t Pay Self-Published Author For Books It Mistakenly Gave Away
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The agreement wasn't that they get to change the price any time they like. The agreement was that they get to match competitors. They violated that.
Not to mention that he may have a case for piracy for commercial gain, in which case Amazon is liable for $300000 a copy (which, at 6000, is more money than most authors will ever see).
Here, it's more like the distributor left their books around in a library, and some people got to read them for free. The publisher can still sell them. There is no direct loss, the damage is hardly quantifiable (it might actually turn out to be a net positive in the end, given all this free publicity).
The digital world is funny like that.
EDIT: this is not to say that Amazon shouldn't be held accountable for their mistake, if there is a breach of contract involved; just that it doesn't matter whether there were 6000 downloads or 60.
Conversely, if piracy should be illegal, then this is false, and Amazon is in trouble.
My point that there was no real loss is tangential to the actual case.
The contract does not support a claim for money, that case is a moral one rather than a legal one.
They'll probably do the corporate thing and give $50k to a lawyer to check the contract rather than giving compensation for the costs they have forced on their client.
The author and Amazon agreed a contract which they both understood which stated rules (Amazon could vary the price) and consequences (essentially none for Amazon so long as what they did was an honest mistake which it seems this was).
The author had the right to not sign it or to ask for amendments (and not sign if they weren't granted) but whether or not it was a good deal for him or not he did agree to those terms and assigned certain rights to Amazon which they were asserting.
Copyright infringement doesn't involve any agreement between the two parties, it's a simple assertion by one party that they don't wish to be bound by the (legal) rights of the other.
They're not comparable situations and whatever superficial similarities exist it's nonsense to suggest they are.
What matters is the disputed amount ($13,000), whether the author wants to play hardball, and whether Amazon would rather pay him to go away or squash him like a bug (to set an example). Because even if he wins (and I've no idea if he can), it wouldn't be fun if Amazon got nasty.
I'm not a lawyer, and I haven't seen the contract in question, so I have no real idea, but it's not as clear cut as "you agreed not to sue us". It could very well be a bluff by Amazon.
The theoretical - yes, you're right. It may be that the contract isn't airtight, though given that this appears to have been a genuine mistake rather than malice or profiteering on Amazon's part my suspicion is that the damage waiver isn't that unreasonable.
The practical - $13,000 is nothing in the world of legal fees, no-one in their right mind would sue a multi-billion dollar company over such an amount, especially with a case that's not clear cut and that's the absolute maximum financial loss you can assign to it and there's a reasonable argument that the figure would be lower.
Personally I think that Amazon should come to a goodwill settlement of a few thousand dollars with him but I suspect that's why I'm the one who hands over silly amounts of money to Jeff Bezos each month rather than the other way around.
I would say it's more like some people walked out of the library with them. The author most certainly did lose something: sales.
But they didn't lose 6000 sales, they lost however many sales they would have made at $6. So it's tricky to quantify the damages.
* Weasel wording here because it seems likely to me that the distribution contract ends up giving Amazon the right to do this sort of thing with this guy's copyrighted work.
How can you "lose" a sale that you don't know you'd get? I bet 6000 downloads for an unknown writer of zombie-pulp wouldn't have happened without the £0 price tag. We can argue about it all day, but the fact is that there is no direct loss, and if there is an indirect one, it's still very, very hard to quantify.
Your argument hinges on the idea that he wouldn't have made a single sale and would still have expended time and effort in promotion of the work if he knew it were being given away for free.
The difficulty in quantifying the cost is largely irrelevant IMO. Either Amazon are guilty or not and if found guilty the court I'm sure has an equivalent case of similarly priced works being given away for free that they could use to model the award given to the appellant (eg mp3.com $25k per work/CD made available). Such an award should be in terms of punitive damages.
If you cannot quantify any damages, you are not entitled to any compensation. It's as simple as that, really. Or are you seriously going to argue that "there could have been possibly maybe with a certain unknown probability which I cannot prove" is a sufficient claim in court (or actually, anywhere else as well)?
No. If anything, they are walking out of the library with a perfect copy of the book, while the library still has the original. Nobody looses anything. People need to stop clinging to paid distribution of content as a business model. It's obsolete.
The fact that it still rolls in billions has nothing to do with any justification of the business model. To use an extreme analogy: slave trade rolled in a huge profit as well. Would that be a justification for slave trade for you?
Guess they have to get a job or something.
Also, there are very few artists which can actually live of their art alone, WITH copyright. That wouldn't change much without it. It's how things always have been, despite what the content industry would like you to believe. Your petty appeal to emotion won't change it, either.
Finally, ignoring the fact that rms is a strawman in this context, if you'd ever read what he writes about selling software, you'd know that it does not really matter to him as long as the essential freedoms are preserved (beer vs freedom).
If there's no money to be made in producing content, then nobody will produce content (aside from financially independent amateurs, in the model of the 18th century novelists). There needs to be some way to monetize the labor and time that goes into the production of art and entertainment.
IMO, anyone who claims that paid distribution needs to go away also bears the burden of proposing an alternative that makes rational business sense. Ads? Donations? Netflix-esque subscription models? Pick one or pick something else entirely, but the answer isn't "business as usual, except nobody earns a return on investment."
Sigh, how often have I heard this by now? It's a lie, and you know it. The only thing that will stop existing are the big content industries.
>There needs to be some way to monetize the labor and time that goes into the production of art and entertainment.
And where did I exclude that? I merely said that paid distribution of content is no longer a viable business model. Gatekeepers are no longer needed in a modern information society. Besides, I don't care about the copyright industry's profits and it enrages me that you think I should[1].
>IMO, anyone who claims that paid distribution needs to go away also bears the burden of proposing an alternative that makes rational business sense.
Why should I need to propose an alternative? I'm stating a factual truth: the business model is obsolete, and trying to preserve it by force ultimately hurts everyone's rights and liberties. If the alternative is no alternative, then so be it.
An analogy: If somebody would invent teleportation, it would not be his or her job to come up with new business models for the industries that produce or provide other means of transportation. And no, this is not an utopian scenario. It has happened hundreds, if not thousand times in the past. A new technology came along, making an older one obsolete, and possibly putting entire industries out of business[2]. Nobody complained. Until now - when the content industry is the first that thinks it's entitled to laws and regulation to safe their business model from rightly going the way of the dinosaur.
[1] Shamelessly ripped off from http://torrentfreak.com/i-dont-care-about-your-profits-and-i...
[2] Another very nice essay by Rick Falkvinge, also on TF: http://torrentfreak.com/nobody-asked-for-a-refrigerator-fee-...
[citation needed] What is the "truth"? That e.g. artists will be fine because they can make more from concerts? Too bad about artists who make incredibly wonderful CDs but have no stage presence. I guess they don't deserve to be artists then.
Or, wait, I know, they can buy t-shirts, stick their name on them and charge 50 times what they cost. People will buy them because they want the artist to keep producing! Do people not realize merchandise sales are just a form of charity? After all media is free, what are you going to do when people get sick of giving to this charity?
>I don't care about the copyright industry's profits
Here it sounds like you're talking about something different than I am. I don't care about the profits of obsolete middle men. I care about someone who's good at music, acting, writing, whatever being able to make a living from it. And not by depending on charity or throwing events.
Too bad about those companies who make incredibly beautiful buggy-whips, but have no other income, I guess they don't deserve to be buggy-whip makers then!
Either we embrace the capitalism-fuelled race to productivity enhancement or we don't, but I fail to see why a minority of the population is entitled to lifetime (and even posthumous) subsidies because they refuse to show themselves in public, while the remaining 90% is not.
> I don't care about the profits of obsolete middle men. I care about someone who's good at music, acting, writing
Then how can you defend a system that was written by and for these obsolete middle-men? A system that sees the overwhelming majority of arts-related profits going to middlemen, while artists starve ? For each billion dollars in the entertainment industry, only a few millions go to a few selected, market-friendly artists, and that's obscene.
I'm trying to understand your point as far as intellectual property. Is it your belief that IP should not be compensated for and the only cost of the work should be whatever is necessary to the goods into consumers hands, be it physical or digital distribution?
I'm not trying to debate that particular position on intellectual property with this post, I'm just trying to establish if that is in fact the position you're taking.
Legally you're wrong.
This is the reason why you can't call giving away someone else's copyright work on purpose "non-commercial". If you enter the market with the same product for free you interfere with the commercial operation of the rightful owner who is selling for a higher price. You can't generally sell a book to a person who has already been given that book for free. Moreover the effort in promoting the book has been lost without reward.
Now granted it might work out that giving away the product for free acts to increase overall sales. But it's not Amazon's place to make that call (the Bit-torrent/bootlegger defence I suppose you'd call this). Amazon infringed on the copyright of the author.
IMO the legal system should come down hard on a company that is trying to leverage copyright for their own gains whilst simultaneously denying the creator of copyright works the reward of their labours.
Consider a converse situation, that I take a product from a distributor (Disney say), duplicate it and give it away for free. How many millions of pounds do you think I'd be on the hook for?
Incidentally I'm not saying that is right, I'm saying that's how copyright law plays out.
What really matter here is the breach of contract. The contract specified when Amazon can drop the price, that condition was not met, they dropped the price. Apologies or blaming computers are not what is called for here.
Please, let's keep exponential around as a word with meaning. It conveys something useful.
Mind you, I don't agree with the specific numbers they're citing, but the general logic works. It's kind of like the Drake equation, everyone can agree on the general format, but you can plug in specific values to make it mean whatever you want.
If they only went after the initial seeder, I could understand. But that's completely counterfactual.
How come when a big company gets "ripped off" they can charge far more than the retail price for every copy but when the actual creator gets ripped off he gets nothing and people equivocate on even the numbers?
lim(number_of_lawyers) = 0 USD payed
1 -> infiniteI understand that some people view disabling that feature as less of an anti-customer move than I do, but to hate it enough to waive half your royalties?
In the past Amazon has given me two grants for free AWS usage ($1000 and $300) so I personally consider them to be generous, for a corporation. I would bet that no one with real authority at Amazon reviewed this case because if they had, I think they would have made a small good-will payment.
In your case, the marginal cost to Amazon of providing AWS was negligible, and Amazon has full rights to offer products they create as freebies, so such grants easily translate to goodwill. In this case, Amazon doesn't own all rights to the product, so it's a bit more murky. It would be as if Amazon was granting you freebies but were only resellers rather than providers of AWS, and didn't compensate the actual provider.
If a customer says they didn't receive a package and file an A-Z claim, they win 99% of the time, even when the seller has proof of delivery.
I understand that we don't want bad sellers ripping people off, but Amazon should at least hold themselves to the same standards.
They also can't really seem to get their act together. In the past 6 months, every time they make a change to their system, sellers lose orders for weeks. Amazon won't ever admit this of course, but as a seller, I can't chock it up to a coincidence anymore.
It really makes me wonder what kind of code base they are working with.
In the end, he'll probably be secretly thanking Amazon for allowing him to rise above obscurity.
Amazon isn't a distributor in this case any more than the person who owns the tent at a fleamarket allows people to sell underneath it.
In any case, Amazon's automatic algorithm to save themselves money from having to pay humans to do it nipped them this time and they owe the author. Do the right thing and settle Amazon. Take it out of the programmer's pay if necessary - better yet their manager who was supposed to review the code before it executed.
Most people who sell products do. You sell at your wholesale price, and the retailer sets the retail price.
Amazon clearly believes: - the cost/benefit for this guy to sue doesn't work out in his favor - no (or an insignificant number of) other authors will pull their content in an attempt to negotiate a change in the contract terms
Sucks.
It's a cost of doing business. I do think Amazon should reimburse the guy if only to save on negative publicity over a very small amount.
I don't feel this is quite true. in the ebook-fleamarket example Amazon are also the person that handles any transactions under the tent, helps the customer find what they are looking for, designed the structure of the flea market, and is not insignificantly responsible for way in which a fair few people take their products home.
If Amazon gets off lightly they probably won't change anything, and this could happen to some other unsuspecting author.
Not to mention the now-clear potential for malicious activity that this process illustrates: If one wanted to cause trouble for an author, apparently they could just post three chapters of a book to the Nook store at $0 and watch the target author's Kindle revenue drop to zero.
Amazon's incentive is clearly to err on the side of price drops -- particularly if they suffer no serious legal/PR damage from false-positives.
You can only get %70 if you charge more than $2.99 and opt-in to Kindle Lending. Does that mean that authors don't get anything for books read through Kindle Lending? That seems terrible if true. Kindle Lending is the reason I finally signed up for Amazon Prime, and I would expect authors to get a cut of that revenue.
With Kindle Lending, there is no substantive gain for authors.
They gain access to readers who won't put up with being forbidden to lend someone a book.
I'm familiar with Lulu.com, and their standard ebook split gives 80% after the first $0.99 to the author. They even have a special going on right now giving 90%. (http://www.lulu.com/publish/ebooks/?cid=nav_ebks)
Granted you could argue that getting distribution on Amazon and all the Kindle owners is worth the difference. That's what makes it difficult to build a competitor. You could easily make an auction site, but the network effect of eBay is what sets it apart, not the features or pricing.
Most self-publishers are not making huge amounts of money to justify spending more than a token amount on such monitoring.
A bigger app/suite of services to support self-publishers (especially as many are not tech-savvy) might be helpful, which could include this.
One would expect that this publicity will do a lot more for profits than the 'lost sales' would have.
An ISBN is assigned to each edition and variation (except reprintings) of a book.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Standard_Book_Num...
Sure, Amazons customer service could be better and should probably at least have sent an email stating that they're lowering the price etc.
So there's the trade-off: you're listed in Amazon's market that is seen by more people than probably any other e-book market and you're getting royalties directly, but if Amazon screws up, too bad.