14 DAY TRIAL // Earlier this week Amazon removed several titles from the accounts of some users of the company's e-book reader, the Kindle. The users had bought and paid for the e-books but, apparently, the company that sold them through Amazon's online store didn't have the right to do it. This prompted Amazon to delete the books from the devices and refund the money to the users. As expected, most people weren't happy and the public outcry that followed prompted the company’s CEO Jeff Bezos to issue an apology for the incident, vouching that it wouldn't happen again.
“This is an apology for the way we previously handled illegally sold copies of 1984 and other novels on Kindle. Our "solution" to the problem was stupid, thoughtless, and painfully out of line with our principles. It is wholly self-inflicted, and we deserve the criticism we've received. We will use the scar tissue from this painful mistake to help make better decisions going forward, ones that match our mission,” Bezos wrote on the Amazon Kindle Community forums. He signed off “with deep apology to our customers.”
The tiles at the heart of the problem were digital copies of George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four (1984) and Animal Farm and the irony speaks for itself. The reasons behind the removal were valid and the company issued refunds to the customers involved but the act itself left many feeling betrayed and their privacy invaded. Big Brother theories aside, the move really didn't help with Amazon's public image and it's nice to see that the company believes it was a “stupid” move and is apologizing for the fact, even if spurred only by the public uproar.
But the issue here is a thornier and deeper one. As content moves from a physical to a digital support, most people don't necessarily realize the distinctions and assume that things that were taken for granted in the real world hold in the virtual one. While it's hard to see Amazon breaking into your home at night, or rather use a key to enter, to make for a more accurate analogy, and taking back books you have bought from it leaving you a coupon behind, this type of thing can easily happen for digital content and, while some may argue its ethics, it isn't by any means illegal.
In fact, Amazon isn't the only one with this capability; Apple has a similar system put in place for its iPhone App Store, which allows it to remove an app from your phone without your knowledge or consent. The company hasn't used the feature until now and it is only meant as a means of removing potentially dangerous applications but it’s easy for this kind of power to be abused. And, as we move forward, this kind of incidents are bound to happen again.