Amazon revokes ebooks

Buying Amazon Kindle books? Amazon may take books you "purchased" away from you. (backup) From the article, "As one of my readers noted, it's like Barnes & Noble sneaking into our homes in the middle of the night, taking some books that we've been reading off our nightstands, and leaving us a check on the coffee table."

Amazon can take your books away from you. In the future more and more books will be published in online form only, and if they all have DRM systems like Amazons, a book can be unpublished. It's as if you never had it. You can learn about the dangers of a society where history can be rewritten in this way in Orwell's novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. But don't look for it on your Kindle, since that's one of the books that was unpublished.

Amazon claims the books were never legal in the first place. They were essentially digital bootlegs. However, if Barnes & Noble were sloppy and accidentally sold bootleg books to customers, they would have no right to break into your home and take them back.

If you purchase something locked with DRM, you don't actually own it.* You have a license to access it. That license can be revoked for a variety of reasons, all out of your control.

* To be clear, if you buy a random book off the shelf at Barnes & Noble, you legally own that specific copy. You do not receive, nor do you need a license to read it, lend it out, resell it, quote from it, or use it as bird cage liner. Copyright law limits your right to make copies, it does not eliminate ownership.

(2009-07-24: Typo fix.)