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Comment by crazygringo | Hacker News Reader

Is there any kind of potential law that can be used against this?

There are limits to what contracts are allowed to legally do. And the idea that a contract can be broken, to the detriment of one side, due to the actions of a third party that neither has control over, and that the contract isn't primarily about, seems highly suspect.

Obviously there are some legitimate reasons for contracts around third-party actions -- betting, derivatives, insurance policies, and so on. Which are either for entertainment or risk mitigation.

But what Amazon is doing here simply feels abusive. However I'm not a lawyer so I don't know if there's a legal term for this type of "abuse" in contract law.

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I suspect the terms of service for the Kindle lets Amazon do this.

It's been clear for a long time now that if you use a Kindle you don't "own" the content you read on it. Very, very clear. Ironically I think it all started when an Orwell book was taken down. It's hard to feel sorry for Kindle buyers when this stuff has been known for a long time.

Yeah it was 1984. Which was almost too much and i don't know nobody internally balked at it simply to refuse being that deeply ironic. Or they thought it was hilarious, which I suppose is a possibility.

Pretty dumb stuff happens at big companies all the time, although this is a rare case of it being both public and hilarious.

This whole book takedown thing is another dumb move that probably happened because someone thought it was a good idea to zealously enforce an exclusivity contract without realizing what would happen -- especially not realizing the possibility that third parties might put books on torrent sites in order to hurt the authors and get their books removed from Kindles.

When big companies do dumb things, people have a tendency to vastly overestimate the amount of thought and intention that went into it. This was probably a dumbass move by some mid-level person who thought they were helping.

I do, however, own the books I pirate. The choice is pretty clear for me.

Honestly, this is my feeling on the matter. I definitely buy books from the Kindle store as it is convenient and the author(s) get paid. If Amazon decides to mess around with my licenses or take books away, I will just take to the high seas to replace them.

In the mean time, though, I do feel like I'm doing the "right thing".

You're not doing the right thing if you're helping to enforce DRM. This removes power from both authors and readers to Amazon's benefit. If you want to do the right thing, buy a physical book and then pirate the ebook.

I don't want a physical object, though. With the way I'm doing it the author receives payment and I get to read their book without having to find space on a bookshelf or carry a bunch of bulky books with me while I travel.

Clearly there are already ways to remove the DRM, and the lifespan of a Kindle is decades so they will not easily be able to add new DRM to the old hardware.

In my opinion, it's roughly analogous to Steam but it moves at a glacial pace.

They're slowly closing DRM loopholes and getting rid of old hardware. Older versions of Kindle for PC that allow you to remove DRM won't let you download books published after Jan. 3rd 2023, they won't let you use the download and transfer feature to download Kindle Unlimited books any more either. They've given 1st gen Kindle owners/users new hardware, offered discounts to 2nd Gen owners, etc.

I'm genuinely curious as to why Amazon Kindle DRM seems to be so difficult. Whenever I look at the current state of affairs to try and backup my book collection, I find a lot of howtos on how to do it, all of them broken, with people discussing when such-and-such update broke it etc. And on the other hand, deDRMing and backing up stuff from Amazon Video is trivial with e.g. StreamFab. You'd expect it to be the other way around.

Amazon doesn't have control of all of the devices which support Amazon Video.

The revenue gained from those devices is likely greater than the revenue lost from people pirating content who would actually pay for it.

They don't have control of all the devices that support Kindle books either. Right now you can read them in a web browser, Android, iOS, Mac and Windows.

They control the software for those platforms, and it can be updated.

There are blu-ray players which support Amazon video and they can not be updated by Amazon.

I'm not sure but parent might be talking about the contract between Amazon and the author of the book, since violation of the terms of that contract is the rationale Amazon is using to take down these books. I.e. how can Amazon claim that the author violated their exclusivity agreement when the author did not consent to the book being released on The Pirate Bay and such a release was the result of copyright violation by a third party.

You're barking up the wrong tree here.

1) The Terms of Service for usage of Kindle devices are not relevant to a contract between Amazon and an author whose work is published through Kindle Unlimited.

2) Kindle Unlimited is a "all you can eat" subscription service. Users of the service explicitly do not own the books they download and read through it, just like you don't own the music you listen to on Spotify or whatnot.

> 1) The Terms of Service for usage of Kindle devices are not relevant to a contract between Amazon and an author whose work is published through Kindle Unlimited.

No, but it's definitely relevant for Kindle users who purchased a book only to see it disappear from their devices!

This has literally only ever happened once. Among millions of titles available on Kindle, a book was only remotely pulled from user's devices once. I'm not saying this was ok, I'm saying that clearly the issue is completely blown out of proportion.

It's happened more than that, because an Orwell title was mentioned here and it happened to me years ago with a title from another author. (This was before Unlimited existed and I've never used Unlimited.)

Amazon also removed an anime I purchased in 2019. For a while it said it wasn't available to watch in my location. As of today it's trying to sell it to me again!

It's never happened since - you are almost certainly mistaken.

This is a common problem with digital storefronts - people think they bought something from store X, but they actually got it from store Y or on a different account.

Amazon remembers every order you've ever placed - including digital ones. Check whether you can find the order in your order history - if you can see the order, but not the item, Amazon customer support will add it to your account again.

Since what? The Orwell incident? I wasn't aware of it. I discovered the book I'm talking about missing on July 16, 2013. It reappeared in my Kindle library a few years ago but was gone for most of the intervening period.

In the case of the anime, I have the order on Amazon and can follow the link to the item. I also know a bit about the production and release of this anime in different markets and can assure you I'm not mistaken.

Well if you have the order reference in your amazon purchase history, but the book isn't physically visible in your kindle library, then contact Amazon support and ask them to sort it out - that sounds like a bug not a deliberate action.

It may have been a bug but it coincided with the physical book going out of print, and reappeared in my Kindle library when the physical book was reprinted.

An amateur voice actor began doing a podcast how himself reciting a very large work in public domain.

It was amazing!

He tried to monitize by selling it digitally on Amazon music. Amazon figured out he was sneaking around Audible, and stopped it.

Now I can’t download those “songs” - in fact they don’t exist anywhere in Amazon’s system.

Apparently they've stopped pulling them from individual physical Kindles, but they still pull them from "your library" and the cloud reader (which is very much presented as being your own space full of books that you privately own). http://teleread.com/amazon-removes-incest-related-erotica-ti...

It’s happened more than once.

Users who buy a book in a foreign country have lost the book when they got home.

Amazon accused them of flouting jurisdictions and trying to buy something not for sale in their country.

In fairness, there’s an audiobook I really, really want that isn’t available in the US Audible store, but is available in foreign Audible stores.

I really really want this book - it’s a poem I really love recited by a voice actor I really love.

But if I purchase it on a trip, or use a VPN Amazon could kill my entire Kindle/Audible collection.

So I bought the audio cassette on eBay.

That's not even remotely the same. That's like saying you "lose" your driving licence if you move to a foreign country(because it stops being valid). Those users still own the books they bought, they can only access them in regions where they bought them because that's the limit of the digital licence on the product - nothing has been removed from their library, it just became inaccessible temporarily(while they reside elsewhere).

Kindle Unlimited books are "free" books if you're paying for the subscription. It's similar to Netflix removing a show, you have no recourse because you never bought the show.

> No, but it's definitely relevant for Kindle users who purchased a book only to see it disappear from their devices!

Actually, no, that's even more irrelevant.

I feel like I'm repeating myself here, but: Kindle Unlimited is a subscription service. It is not the same as purchasing Kindle-formatted ebooks through the main Amazon web store, nor is it the same as a Kindle device. (Kindle Unlimited doesn't even require Kindle hardware; they're just both marketed under the same brand name.)

> just like you don't own the music you listen to on Spotify or whatnot.

technically you don't own any music (aside from one you made on your own I guess), just own some kind of license to use it

Copyright restricts the right of copying to the copyright holder. Once they make a copy, and sell it, they've sold a copy. You seem to confuse the world for a place where only streaming subscription services exist.

> It's been clear for a long time now that if you use a Kindle you don't "own" the content you read on it.

Not everyone reads tech news. As long as Amazon uses "buy" rather than "rent" or "subscribe" I don't think most people will notice.

This sounds like something some government somewhere could go after Amazon for, but I very much doubt that it'll happen any time soon.

They do use 'subscribe' for Kindle Unlimited.

The Kindle came out in 2007 - nearly 16 years ago.

The "1984" incident happened in 2009 - nearly 14 years ago.

Amazon modified their terms and conditions to make it difficult for them to do something like that again.

I'm not sure that one example means anything in 2023.

>There are limits to what contracts are allowed to legally do. And the idea that a contract can be broken, to the detriment of one side, due to the actions of a third party that neither has control over, and that the contract isn't primarily about, seems highly suspect.

I hate to be "defending" amazon here, but I doubt that they're doing this intentionally. In other words, they're not trying to retaliate against authors that had the audacity to have their books on torrent sites. Their behavior in this case resulted from a series of seemingly logical actions, at least when considered independently:

1. they have some sort of program which promises some sort of benefits (eg. higher royalties) in exchange for exclusivity

2. to enforce the above, they created an enforcement team to scour the internet looking for infractions

3. some worker was tasked with some vague task like "can you find this book on an alternate distribution platform?", and they were able to turn up some instances. Maybe it's not obvious to them that it's an unauthorized site (I don't pirate ebooks but some pirate streaming sites look plausibly "legit"), or they do but they don't give a fuck (the backoffice interface has a yes or no checkbox, and they're too lazy to draft an email to management informing of this edge case), so they flag that book as violating the agreement.

This only holds until it becomes a media story.

"Amazon is aware of the complaints and informs TorrentFreak that it’s working with the people involved to find an appropriate solution."

That's PR speak indicating they won't be reversing this policy and re-adding everyone banned. So now it's an official policy endorsed at a high level and can be criticized as such.

I think you're underestimating how much time it takes to get the ball rolling on policy change in an organization as big as amazon. The story was published today, and even though torrentfreak reached out to amazon for comment, it's not clear how much time transpired between "amazon PR department is made aware of media story" and the article was published on torrentfreak. It could be very well be as short as "a few hours before publication".

Honestly, I’m okay with holding companies responsible for the results of systems they set up. That it occurs in several steps with disparate actors at each point does nothing to absolve them of the overall effect.

And with regard to the short time since publication, I don’t think the clock starts when there’s negative PR about an issue, nor when they are informed about an issue. The clock starts at the point where, if the system were well-run, they would have become aware of the issue. That is, neither ignoring an issue nor cultivating silos of ignorance should garner any sympathy.

More like less money to be made while it's available for free so why bother offering it at all

That doesn't make any sense. Based on a skim of the KDP site, it looks like they're using the spotify payment model. In other words, a portion of kindle unlimited subscription proceeds is used to pay authors that have enrolled their books to be available on kindle unlimited. The allocation is determined by some metric (eg. time spent reading book), but the total amount is fixed. It doesn't matter whether amazon offers 1M books or 100k books, or a user reads 1 book or 100 books, since the only thing that changes is how the amount gets distributed among the authors.

I asked someone who was published how Kindle Unlimited works. There's a pool of cash reserved for each month and authors are compensated a certain amount per pages read. There's a maximum number of pages, per customer, which will be counted.

You can see the full breakdown here: https://kdp.amazon.com/en_US/help/topic/G201541130

Unfortunately it seems to be mostly automated. In my experience if your book shows up on some foreign site that appeared out of nowhere and clearly is just a machine translated copy of the description, and the site doesn't even actually have a copy of the ebook to provide, all your KDP titles get delisted.

You can usually get Amazon to put the books back up, but it tends to take a while and is very disheartening having all your work removed. It's been a problem for years, but Amazon basically owns the market so there's not much you can do.

> And the idea that a contract can be broken, to the detriment of one side, due to the actions of a third party that neither has control over, and that the contract isn't primarily about, seems highly suspect.

Isn't this actually an incredibly important part of every contract? Surely I would want any contract I'm part of to be clear about what happens if one of the relevant parties gets injured, or is unable to fulfill their obligations due to any reason beyond their control.

You may be limited to the Tortoise of Interference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tortious_interference

which means you could go after the third party for getting the contract broken, but it's likely that what Amazon has in the terms allows them to do this.

As they say, the little green legs of justice turn slowly...

Thank you! Just sent you $3 Amazon bucks and got a copy of gumroad. Perfect timing for a project I’m working on and have zero foundation in SEO

The author has some control over it, he may, for instance, issue takedown notices, and some may argue that if the pirate website didn't receive a takedown notice, the author didn't do his job protecting his IP and was, therefore complicit. The author may respond that Amazon itself allowed piracy. It may take lengthy legal battle that no one but lawyers will win.

Also, contract law varies a lot by country. What is allowed in the US may not be allowed in France for instance, adding an extra layer of complexity.

read the TOS. i dont know how many times it needs to be said, but at the end of the day the EULA and TOS for kindle and amazon books is a RENTAL agreement (and a pretty awful one at that.)

the question that has to be settled by the courts (if ever) is whether or not "buy" button is a bait-and-switch if Amazon reserves the right to rescind your purchase at any time without a refund.

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