You don’t own your e-books: Amazon to customer

If all the books on your shelf suddenly disappeared, you’d probably say you’d been robbed.

But when a Norwegian woman lost access to her Kindle books without warning, she learned she had never owned them in the first place.

Linn Jordet Nygaard, 30, an IT consultant from Oslo, said the debacle began two weeks ago when her Kindle stopped working; she later discovered she was locked out of her Kindle account, and could not access her library.

In what appeared to have been an administrative error, Nygard was told her account had been closed for violating Amazon’s terms of service, and she was reminded that her e-books were not her property.

Nygaard’s account was restored Monday, and Amazon is also shipping her a new Kindle. But the story serves as a reminder that consumers don’t actually own their e-books or other digital media. They are renting them — and the retailer can yank them back at any time.

“It’s a real wake-up call for consumers,” said David Fewer, an intellectual property lawyer and director of the Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic.

When you buy a copy of The Great Gatsby from a bookstore, it becomes your property. And with that comes ownership rights: to loan it to a friend, to sell it in a garage sale, to hand it down to your kids.

But e-books do not come with any of those rights. Instead, the terms and conditions for Apple iTunes, Kobo Books and Amazon Kindle state you cannot share or resell the content, and access can be revoked at any time.

“There’s no physical asset …. There’s nothing you can say you own,” said Fewer. “Companies are taking that opportunity to impose all sorts of terms that are unfavourable to consumers.”

Amazon, Apple and Kobo did not reply to the Star’s multiple requests for comment.

The way that digital books and music are sold has a lot to do with how software is sold, said Mark Hayes, a technology and copyright lawyer.

“In the 1980s, when software started to be distributed widely, there was considerable discussion about the nature of the rights,” he said.

To prevent piracy, software developers began licensing — rather than selling — software to customers with terms and conditions attached.

When e-books and other digital media appeared, retailers like Amazon reproduced that model, Hayes said.

The issue has come before the courts in the U.S., most notably in a 2010 case that effectively ruled the “first sale” doctrine — a copyright provision that allows buyers of physical books and CDs to sell them later — did not apply to digital media.

But there is no explicit “first sale” doctrine in Canada and no similar cases have been argued, Hayes said.

It is rare for a retailer to remotely delete users’ content. In 2009, Amazon erased copies of George Orwell’s 1984from customers’ Kindles after the e-books were sold without the appropriate rights.

Afterwards, Amazon announced it wouldn’t do that again: “We are changing our systems so that in the future we will not remove books from customers’ devices in these circumstances.”

In Nygaard’s case, the company did not remotely delete her books. In a statement posted to Amazon customer service forums, a representative wrote, “We would like to clarify our policy on this topic. Account status should not affect any customer’s ability to access their library.”

But her Kindle was broken and her account was locked, so she couldn’t download her library onto her iPad or laptop.

Nygaard takes the experience as a warning that her digital media is not as secure as she once thought.

“I used to think that these things don’t happen, but now that they have with Amazon, you can never really be sure.”