When ok buys a book for kindle, it seems that one supposedly doesn’t own the book? One “owns” it at the “goodwill” of Amazon?
I put my kindle on eBay today and I think going forward I’ll consider buying physical books and when necessary “finding” the digital versions of it?
I think a relatively small proportion of people buying media online fully comprehend that—based on a contract negotiation gone wrong or just the whim of a senior exec—the things they've "bought" can simply be taken away from them. Sellers should be required to make it fully clear (e.g. not just in their 73 page ToS) that they're selling something impermanent and entirely unlike owning physical media.
Unlike a lot of people on here I think I don’t have fundamental problems with DRM, but I think consumers absolutely should be guaranteed more rights over the things they buy. Maybe something like.
* access is non revokable and if any part of the drm scheme stops working the provider must provide a drm stripping tool
* access is transferable
This is unenforcable even in the presence of good will. (If a company goes bankrupt, they might simply not have the resources, or, if relevant programmers leave, then they might not have the ability, to distribute a stripping tool.) A practical measure in this direction might be to mandate that DRM schemes "phone home," which they surely do already, and that they are required to disable themselves if they don't get an affirmative signal.
(Of course, this has its problems from the publishers' point of view, but as a customer I'd be very pleased with it.)
Theres no reason taking away our rights should be easy for the company when DRM mostly just makes life miserable for anyone trying to buy digital goods legally.
Easy. Lock it with a key that functions like a deadman switch and releases into the Library of Congress
But you already are required to deposit your books (or other copyrighted works) with the British Library upon publication and many other countries do the same thing.
https://bookisbn.org.uk/legal-deposit/
The US should probably do the same thing, but the amount of American works that aren't covered by the British Library are probably minimal.
Do this before next Wednesday and you might save your Kindle books!
Old kindles are best for this; save books in the older .azw3 format. I’m not sure about newer Kindles that use .kfx
Yup. Same for movies, games, music, etc. It's pretty wild how many hard-won rights we abdicated in the move to digital pseudo-property. Not wild in the sense that it's surprising consumers would place a priority on convenience when it came to making purchasing decisions. Wild that legally there's such a huge difference between physical and digital goods. Like, all the consumer rights and protections built up over centuries were deemed invalid on a technicality. "Move fast and break things" indeed.
That's exactly what I've started doing.