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> be skeptical of such stories

Don't be too skeptical. Most of the people on HN had some big company restrict/kill an account by some BigCo at some point.

Microsoft, Google, eBay, PayPal, Amazon, Facebook, etc. handle millions of accounts. They have automated filters that trigger based on specified criteria that kill your account.

Their default response when this happens? Talk to legal. Well, more like write to legal. They don't want to talk to you.

The problem? Microsoft has your operating system, Google has your email, eBay has your stuff, PayPal has your money, Amazon has your books, Facebook has your social life, etc.

And they can yank all of that away.

They don't even press any button. It's triggered automatically by criteria they never disclose beyond a vague TOS.

We need to push for a universal option for arbitration by a 3rd party regarding these sorts of unilateral actions. If anything, it will probably reduce the support and legal costs for all of these companies.

"Don't be too skeptical. Most of the people on HN had some big company restrict/kill an account by some BigCo at some point."

Most? That is a pretty serious statement, and I really doubt you can back it up. I don't have statistics on this and don't know where to look for them, but I would guess that the numbers of HN'ers that have had an account closed by a BigCo is actually much less than 1%, never mind more than 50%.

Am I grossly underestimating here? Keep in mind that these stories tend to be very popular, so there could definitely be a lot more of these stories around than is statistically correct.

P.s. As for one of cletus' point above, I've also noticed a few of these kinds of points eventually bring out more details which tend not to confirm the events, as told in the original posts. Nothing specific to this case of course, I've just caught myself a few times thinking "hmmm, looks like it wasn't such a crystal-clear case of the company being wrong".

My father had a 6 year old paid flickr account with 30k photos, 2m+ views, shut down without warning or explanation.

It contained tons of original genealogical research, macro shots of plants, photographs of family-related newspaper stories... And possibly some videos with copyrighted music clips.

It's a shame how far we've fallen from traditional justice, which involves:

1. right to confront your accuser, 2. right to legal representation, 3. knowing the charges and evidence against you 4. right to call witnesses and present evidence 5. judgement by your peers

I know, flickr owns the servers, they make the rules etc.

But as human beings, and as a company, I think it's a mistake for them to behave this way.

The feeling of injustice is really powerful, and I think everyone would be better served if companies didn't disregard it.

I agree that they are making a big mistake causing those feelings of rage and helplessnes.

But the rights you list are rights we have in court. We never had any right to representation in an internal procedure of some private company.

If our access to essential digital facilities ends up being dominated by a handful of global companies, these companies will be regulated like traditional facilities if they don't start regulating themselves in a sensible way very quickly.

Resolving conflicts, finding out what the truth is in a particular case, all of that costs money. We will either pay it in taxes or as part of a purchase we make.

Flickr is yahoo's toy, if they get pissed off they can take it home and deprive everyone of the game; it's still legal to be a jerk.

The whole world used to be that way, though - kings owned everything and if you didn't like it, die - but it pissed people off so bad, they took back the rights to what really was the king's property.

The real problem seems to be how easy it is to enter into extremely unjust agreements online.

In the real world, it's not easy to sign a contract giving up all your future rights - imagine if a car company tried to slip clauses into a car purchase agreement giving them the right to take back the car without explanation at any time. People would rebel. But online, people regularly click through things just as bad as this.

People act like reputation pressure is enough to stop this - but in the real world, not everyone is informed enough to keep up to date on every entity's reputation, and in many places, communities have just taken the shortcut of making certain types of deals illegal, at the expense of the freedom of the seller to make that type of contract.

In the real world, it's not easy to sign a contract giving up all your future rights - imagine if a car company tried to slip clauses into a car purchase agreement giving them the right to take back the car without explanation at any time. People would rebel. But online, people regularly click through things just as bad as this.

In Australia, consumer law prevents unfair terms in contracts by the simple expedient of nullifying them.

In general and not just in Australia, terms in contracts that are against the law are null.

You misunderstand... This is if a contract provision that is unfair, and may not be illegal. A court can strike it down, depending on the circumstances.

In the real world, it may even be irrational for people to keep up to date on every entity's reputation. The time it takes to do that isn't exactly without a cost itself.

Not only that, but I think it would be reasonable to require by law that a service must give its users prompt notice of termination and a reasonable timeframe during which they can download the content they created. What happened to your father AFAIC was a crime.

My eBay account was closed because someone disputed a purchase from a family member, and my previous address was the same as theirs.

Now it would take 99 other HNers who haven't had accounts closed to cancel me out and keep the ratio at 1%.

On the other side of the same coin: HN gets 120k uniques per day (as of October 5, 2011 - http://ycombinator.com/newsnews.html ). So it will take another 1,199 people who've had accounts closed to put the ratio at above 1%.

Of course, this is all incredibly blatant misuse of statistics. What we really need is a poll.

Then we can argue about the biasedness of the poll

>What we really need is a poll.

Ok, /newpoll... >Sorry, polls are turned off for a while.

Now we'll never know.

I tried to make a purchase with PayPal a month or so ago and forgot I was on Tor. They blocked my account until I can verify my location. To verify my location they need to call the landline at my address. Too bad I don't have a landline at my address. There's probably another way to get my account back but I've sort of lost interest now.

You'd be much more motivated if you have thousands of dollars in your account! A similar thing happened with my business's PayPal. I tried to transfer funds, and they decided that it was a good time to re-verify our location. Since we missed the phone call, we now have to wait for them to mail a letter.

I have been (by Reddit), and had no history of spam or disallowed use. I wasted time writing and responding to comments and nobody except me could see anything I wrote. I was unknowingly talking into the void for weeks. That was 5 years ago and to this day, I've never forgiven them.

Good thing that never happens on HN

Arbitration sounds like a really good idea, but the problem is those arbitration systems are typically paid for by industry, run by industry appointees, and they don't have any incentive to see issues from a consumer point-of-view. I think the solution for books will come from lawsuits and consumer backlash - the same as it did for music.

There are still many problems with the Music industry (and RIAA), but they really are leading the curve for the other content industries. Right now you can purchase DRM-free music for relatively cheap from a number of sources. (Apple, Google, Amazon, as well as many independent publishers and artists)

Facebook most certainly does not have my social life. D:

> The problem? Microsoft has your operating system, Google has your email, eBay has your stuff, PayPal has your money, Amazon has your books, Facebook has your social life, etc. And they can yank all of that away.

There's an opportunity here to make an automated backup service for people who want to keep greedy bastards from stealing the stuff they care for.

How much someone would pay to have their emails, profiles, or content safe?

Multiple local backups?

Is there any conceivable scenario where this is in any way excusable?

Deny continued service? Sure (though hardly in the way that is portrayed in the post, you must be able to know why and contest it). Remotely brick hardware and deletion of user data? Never, ever, ever. No - don't even think about thinking about it. NO.

The only thing I can think of would be something wrong with the credit card (fake, chargeback each book), but that would be a new account thing.

For a legitimate purchase, I can think of nothing.

"It could be as simple as the person having the same name as someone who got blocked in the US."

And?! That would be a horrible reason for deleting all of a user's purchased items. More reason for these types of posts to exist. The situation itself doesn't really matter, but bringing attention to the possible dangers of DRM is important. The fact that we don't own these DRMed items is incredibly scary.

"there have definitely been cases that vary between being one side of the story to being a distortion of facts and events to being outright lies."

Okay.. but without data this is just a vague anecdote.

If all you're trying to say is "be careful", well alright. But honestly I don't care. The story itself isn't that important in these cases as long as people are thinking about what the possible dangers of DRM are. And they are really big dangers.

These types of posts are the only action an individual can take when pitted against a big company.

Here is a story from the other side. My wife writes and publishes business book summaries. She submitted about ten of those to be published on Kindle. Amazon happily published some of them in US market but decided that the content was "public domain" is other regions. Now I would have understood if they would have said "copyright violation" but "public domain"?

Our email correspondence with them was very similar to the one reported in the original post. They will repeat the original mail 2-3 times and will walk away after that leaving you with no answers.

Well, I figure when I get home, I'll rsync the kindle over to a local directory. :-)

Get rid of the DRM first. They'd be useless without an amazon account otherwise.

I do this, but not with rsync. I put PDFs and books that I want to read into my Dropbox during the day. When I get home I bidirectionally sync to my kindle dx with Unison (http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/unison/). I wouldn't trust my books with Amazon, ever.

> I don't mind buying Kindle novels because I tend to only ever read them once. And if they were $6 (like the paperbacks often are) I'd view them as a throwaway purchase.

Hmmm, just because a $6 paperback may seem like a throwaway price to you doesn't mean they are single-use products. That's consumerism gone crazy.

I have to admit, I too have a real hard time keeping a cheap paperback presentable after its 2nd or 3rd read (or in subsequent reads, readable, for that matter). I don't know how people do it, so I just make a point to warn my friends about this habit whenever they let me lend one of theirs (and they invariably say "oh I like it when a book looks like it's been read."--sure thing, that'll be no problem!).

Still, that doesn't mean I see them as throwaways, rather I see them as fragile, and IMO the ebook form should lessen this attribute when possible, instead of mimicking (in some sense) it with DRM.

You make it sound like releasing an ebook is somehow cheaper than releasing a paperback. I think in many cases this does not hold true. As long as ebooks represent a minority of all book sales producing paperbacks will be cheaper to produce than ebooks, just by law of mass production.

giggle

Mass production has no beneficial effect when the incremental cost of each unit is indistinguishable from zero.

Volume drives the incremental cost towards marginal cost.

Yes, it might approach zero, but it never gets there. There aren't infinite trees to turn into infinite numbers of books.

I don't understand how ebooks can cost more than a mass production paper book. If you are familiar with the industry of producing paper and ebooks for books that are best sellers then I would really love hear about the cost difference in producing both.

I am, at least to some degree. My back-of-the-envelope calculations a while ago suggested that ebooks are cheaper to produce than paper books, just by not as much as people probably imagine. (My figure then was 25% less, although I confess I don't remember how I came up with that now. It may have been a cocktail napkin.)

There are certain fixed costs which remain the same no matter the format: you have to (or at least should!) pay the authors, editors, proofreaders, artists, and cover designers the same amount no matter the form because they're doing pretty much the same work. And while ebooks don't have typesetting/layout processes identical to physical books, they still have them. And if you don't want the ebooks to look like ass -- something that a lot of big publishers clearly don't care about yet, unfortunately -- it's not going to take all that much less time, particularly if you have to prepare them in multiple formats; you have to do a "final proof," ideally on the actual devices you're targeting.

In practice, all of the costs above are generally much more of the production cost than the actual printing is. The biggest savings you have with an ebook isn't from not paying the printer, it's from not paying the distributor. But there's still a catch there: while you're not giving 50% or more of the cover price to the distributor the way you would if you were trying to get the book into Barnes & Noble or what have you, you're still giving 30% or more of the cover price to the retailer. (And you have to pay attention to the "or more"; you may be paying a middleman like Lulu to get you into some of the online stores, or you may be paying Amazon's bogus "download charges" in addition to their stated 30% cut. Assuming your sale qualifies for their 30% cut bracket, rather than one of the higher ones.)

25% sounds a little high to me. The figure I normally hear is that paper is about 10-15% of the cost of a book (I'm not directly in the publishing industry, but I've been a technical reviewer on several books and have a fair number of friends who are author/editors - mostly in the non-fiction market which is a little different from the fiction world).

See http://journal.bookfinder.com/2009/03/breakdown-of-book-cost... for some vague evidence

(The slice taken by marketing in the above seems high from what others have told me. Its also a somewhat simplistic breakdown since it ignores some of the long-term costs from publishers that aren't related to "books" directly. e.g. the advances to authors who never get published, etc. - so the potential publisher profits aren't quite as large as they appear here - there's other overhead outside the printing/distributing/selling books bit)

Also see http://ireaderreview.com/2009/05/03/book-cost-analysis-cost-...

It's also something Charlie Stross has posted about a fair bit see this collection of posts http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2010/04/common-m...

TL;DR - people think about book prices being related to cost of producing media. That's like thinking software costs are mostly about the price of printing DVDs or shifting bits. It's mostly about book development costs - not media costs.

I have no idea about this.. but I can speculate that maintaining the DRM system indefinitely after the initial sale represents an ongoing cost whose net present value needs to be considered in contrast with a DRM-free book.

The DRM system is completely decentralized and doesn't cost anything to uphold.

Hello! I am unfamiliar with the details of the Kindle DRM implementation. Would you mind explaining at least the degree to which you are familiar with it, if not providing some background and/or links so that I can verify this statement for myself instead of just taking your word for it? Thanks!

(I haven't borrowed any e-books from amazon so maybe they have a different scheme for those)

It has to be decentralized because you don't have to connect your kindle to amazon at any point in order to purchase and read a book.

You can choose to download the book manually from amazon when purchasing and move the file directly to the kindle over USB and be done.

The book is encrypted with your device serial number (or something similar), which is also why, if you would want to strip the DRM from the file (which might be illegal, depending on where you live), you have to supply your kindle serial number to be able to decrypt it.

Well if you ask the publishing a few people they cost more to make, and most say the costs are almost the same. seriously I kid you not. This of course is why they need new accounting departments and financial analysts and are highly prone to being broken apart like crab legs at a vegas buffet.

I can't believe cost would be the dominant factor in the price difference.

More likely, someone who has invested in a kindle will pay a higher price to obtain the convenience of the ebook and justify that investment. Publisher is just maximizing profit by setting price higher.

I am finding myself buying more and more remaindered hardbacks because they are cheaper than the kindle version.

But ebooks don't represent a minority of book sales. On the contrary, Amazon sells more ebooks than print books (both hardbacks and paperbacks combined).

http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-19148146