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Comment by shismijuh | Hacker News Reader

I own 2 kindles. Got one more for Mum also. I need to get my books out ASAP. Somehow, feel very cheated. Nobody can walk into your house and take away your paperbook. This is theft! And then the arrogance of no explanations.

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You did read the Terms and Conditions before you "bought" the books, didn't you?

If you bought the books, you agreed [in the eyes of the law] to this kind of eventuality..

I'm as guilty of this kind of thing as well. We tend to assume an imaginary T&C that conforms to we think is fair when we buy things online - and we have to learn the hard way that the real T&C's are very much more dubious.

Here's the relevant bit in the T&C's:

"Upon your download of Digital Content and payment of any applicable fees (including applicable taxes), the Content Provider grants you a non-exclusive right to view, use, and display such Digital Content an unlimited number of times"

"Your rights under this Agreement will automatically terminate if you fail to comply with any term of this Agreement."

The key points is that this is a "license agreement" that grants you rights on the payment of applicable fees.

TL;DR: You don't own any content you licensed to read on your kindle.

If you read and actually considered the worst case in every contract/website terms and conditions/software licence that you come across it would probably take about a day a week and you would never actually agree to anything that wasn't a GPL/BSD/MIT... software licence. For one thing most give the party offering the agreement rights to change it which should be an absolute no-way.

For most things such as online purchases I tend to rely on law and reasonableness of people and take the chance without reading expecting the maximum downside to be tens of pounds related to that purchase. I am a little more careful when locked into eco-systems (Kindle/app-stores) but still go a fair bit on taking the risk with the reputation of the provider and the size of the risk and the cost of getting the content another way.

The kindle license agreement is relatively short and perfectly understandable.

The moral of this story is: if you give a website some money, find out what you are getting for your money.

Laws trump contracts. You cannot sign away what the law says happened. It's just a matter of convincing a judge that you bought the book. They Amazon's T&Cs are irrelevant.

And, how, pray tell, will you convince the judge of that? You didn't purchase a book, as the T&C's make clear - the contents of which you agreed to by entering into the said agreement.

You paid applicable fees to enter into an agreement to view digital content. Nothing more. There was no purchase of a book.

Where's your evidence to the contrary?

> Where's your evidence to the contrary?

Oh, I don't know. Maybe when he visited the website of one of the largest retailers in the world, broke out his saved credit card like usual, and clicked the gigantic "Buy now with 1-Click" button?

I would love for this to get tested in court. Has it? My understanding (I'm not a lawyer, but heard this from a lawyer) is that the purpose of, say, signing a release form before playing paintball is not because it provides any real protection to the paintball company, but because it makes the signer less likely to sue.

I feel like maybe this is a similar situation? It seems very much like Amazon is "tricking" you into signing away the fact that you "bought" something since the whole experience of the site is devoted to making you think you're buying it. Throwing in a hidden paragraph at the end doesn't change everything.

Well, good luck with the "1-click" button defense. heh.

I agree that Amazon could be a LOT more open and clear about what it is that changes hands (ie some "rights") when we pay "applicable fees".

But, it took me the best part of 10 seconds to find the license agreement. And, once found, couldn't be clearer.

It might vary by country and other factors... When logged in to Amazon.co.uk, with one-click turned on, there's no obvious link anywhere near where the product is presented that I can see. A search for "terms" also revealed nothing. A search for "license" revealed nothing. There's a small link saying "Conditions of Use & Sale" all the way at the bottom of the page.

Clicking on that links takes me to a page that provides a very long list of conditions broken out by use and sale. However, searching for "Kindle" or "book" to find out where they are covered, yield nothing. A customer who has been led by the product page to believe the "Buy" button means what it said, could very reasonably assume they were covered by the terms in the "Sale" section.

I think Amazon is threading a fine line here between having courts (at least in Europe) find that even if it might not constitute a sale, terms that deviate too much from the rights a customer would expect under the sale might be null and void, vs. alternatively find that the prominent language indicating a purchase might be illegally misleading advertising if such terms are allowed to stand...

Then again I might just be too hopeful. In the meantime I won't be "buying" any Kindle books.

It wasn't the "1-click" part of the button that was the defense, it was the "Buy with" part. That is, when you actually click the button, it's telling you that are buying it.

You did purchase the book. It says "Buy" on the website.

Amazon: "Would you like to Buy this book for your Kindle?"

Customer: "Yes" click

Looks like a sale to me. They don't use the word "Rent" or "Borrow". You "buy" it.

Trouble is, you are bound by the license agreement, not by the text on the buttons, as the Conditions of Use and Sale makes clear, which is linked to on every page of Amazon's site.

Unless a judge decides that due to the manner in which it's sold, that it constitutes a sale under the law, and hence all your normal "I've bought a thing" rights come into play. Anything in the T&Cs that takes away the rights the law gives is hence null and invalid.

Agreed. But, we've yet to establish if indeed they do take away rights that the law provides. I would have thought HN would have uncovered such a law by now.

A cursory glance at the Wikipedia article on DRM suggests the law is favourable torwards DRM and all that that entails.

It probably wouldn't be a "law" per se in terms of statutes, it would be down to case law. In other words we won't know until this (or something very similar) goes to court.

It's not so much about DRM per se but rather about what rights you can expect when "buying" an e-book.

At least as far as the US is concerned, shrink wrap licenses restricting your fair use rights were not received favorably by courts up until the late 90s. This has changed somewhat in the past decade and change. It'll be interesting to see what comes out of the supreme court on the 'first sale' case, which is a closely related topic.

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