Student sues Amazon after Kindle eats his homework
By Ross Miller 
posted July 30th 2009 5:10PM
posted July 30th 2009 5:10PM
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posted July 30th 2009 5:10PM
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uhm what?
He was taking notes in the book... a pretty standard practice when reading a book for an assignment, its fairly logical that, at least in the near future, it be applied to E-Books as well. Not his fault at all that Amazon erased his notes an IMO Amazon should be liable,
I'm sorry, but I call bullshit on this. Deletion of a book shouldn't have any effect on his notes, which are saved and stored in a generic file on the Kindle, along with notes and highlights from all his other books. I've deleted many books from my Kindle without losing the notes and highlights in my notes. (Unless, of course, Amazon actually deleted all the notes too; I haven't heard anything about that.) I think this guy just didn't take any notes and now is using this as an excuse.
This is all silly, though, because that book is good enough to read again and take new notes on. Buy a legitimate copy and re-read it.
@ captain obvious. The notes you took where they also made on a book that was pulled from your kindle? If not shut up!
um Captain Obvious I don't see how he didn't have a legit copy on the kindle. Having a physical book truly makes no difference here.
Obviously the kid will now have to go get a physical book and take notes with that, but what he was doing was pretty commendable. A nice blend of future tech with an old book (probably making those notes a hell of a lot more useful too). The whole problem is that he was probably on a deadline and didn't have the time to redo the work that was already done.
@nohoy - "[Obviously he will have to get a physical copy of the book]"
No, that's not obvious nor true… There are legit copies of the book on the Kindle store… The one that was pulled just happened to not be one of them…
Also, I agree with Capt. Obvious… I heard nothing about notes getting wiped… All the notes for all your books are stored in one massive plaintext file… Unless Amazon really did wipe the notes too, they -should- be there. It's very possible that they wiped them (not sure why they would have…) but I haven't heard anything like that from anyone else…
@Captain Obvious:
Of course, even if his notes are intact, the references they include, as well as any highlights and annotations, are all for a version of the text that no longer exists, so even if he buys a new copy of 1984 and transfers the notes over, he'll still have to go through the whole damn thing again and move his annotations and highlights to the correct positions in the new text. Which he should not have to do.
Good on this kid for having the balls to take Amazon to task
i am justins cousin. his notes were not deleted but they are useless now. he has alot of notes referring back to the book which is no longer there. he does have a deadline which needs to be met for his AP class. he is not in it for the money at all and amazon should have not been able to go in and delete books without notifying the users first. its not as simple as everyone is making it seem. he doesnt slack on his homework he does his best and its outstanding. he isnt looking for sympathy just sees that it doesnt happen to anyone else. he had a ligit copy of the book bought plain and simple. please dont judge someone or their case before you know the exact facts.
"2. With an uncanny knack for irony, Amazon recently remotely deleted any traces of
certain electronic copies of George Orwell’s “1984” and “Animal Farm” from customers’
Kindles and iPhones, thereby sending these books down Orwell’s so-called “memory hole.” "
Didn't expect to see that in there. That's just harsh.
Attorneys are often snarky assholes when they write complaints and motions.
I hope he wins
I hope for more than this young gentleman wins. I want Amazon to be crushed. Unfortunately, all that will most likely happen is, they will settle, give the kid some money and call it a day.
A mild business loss is not enough for companies that do shady tactics. While I do use Amazon more often than not, making a boycott rather difficult in my opinion, if they get a legal judgement against them that causes them to go out of business, I would not lose sleep over it, though perhaps for the employees that lost their jobs over some stupid nonsense the company did.
This is the main reason why DRM needs to go. It gets me wondering, do other mediums have the same problem? Now that Apple is yanking items out of the App Store, would they start to yank Apps off your Pod all together?
While so far it seems no, since I do have a few games that been since yanked, but the fact companies are using this kill switch has me nervous.
Legislation needs to be written. There is more at stake here than things being deleted remotely. Once that can of worms gets opened, it is a very slipper slope.
"17-year old high school Justin Gawronski"
The high school itself had been taking notes?
I'm not defending anyone here but...this is the end result of jumping too quickly oh "new" (or relatively new) technologies...you end up getting screwed.
On a side note 1984 is one of the few books they made us read in high school English that I actually enjoyed (and thus actually read instead of just reading cliff notes). I'm a little behind on this but why did Amazon pull this book from their list? It's not exactly what I'd call "controversial subject matter"...I can come up with a lot worse than 1984... Also why in God's name any parent would buy their kids one of these...it's called Half-Priced Books.
amazon pulled it because the person selling it wasn't authorized to sell the book. eg if someone uploaded copies of harry potter and sold them on amazon for their own profit.
They didn't pull the book in general, the publishing company that released that e-copy didn't actually have the rights for it. There are other copies of it available for the Kindle. Unfortunately for him, those other copies don't come with his notes.
Hmm...some people prefer having digital copies of things?
I don't suppose you carry around every CD or Cassette Tape you own, do you?
Digital media is far more portable, obviously...in this case, you can "carry" more than one book with you, since the Kindle is technically the "iPod of books".
I like how you admit you lazily read Cliffs Notes instead of the assigned books (except for 1984!), and now you're asking the commenters to fill you in on what you missed.
DO YOUR HOMEWORK!
"Also why in God's name any parent would buy their kids one of these...it's called Half-Priced Books."
Did you ever think that maybe he bought it himself. I am 15 and I bought my own. Or maybe his parents bought it for him because, maybe he reads a lot and his parents figured it would be easier than buying real books.
Umm this isn't some glitch on the device. And as far as I know I've not heard of anyone else loosing their books or notes due to a glitch. This had NOTHING to do with new tech and everything to do with Amazon being a complete and total doucheb@g.
Do his homework? If he did that he wouldn't be making inane comments on here about articles he didn't read and news stories he knows nothing about. Lack of an education makes people stupid, he didn't bother to get his education when it was offered to him at no cost and the result is before you.
@skyshard
The context doesn't matter. What Amazon did was sell you a "stolen" item and once they realized their mistake, broke into your house took back that item and paid you back. The fact that the item was stolen or that they paid you back doesn't make breaking into your house any legal. Only law enforcement authorities and courts have the right to do so and Amazon is neither.
What Amazon should have done is:
a. Stop Payment to the Original Seller.
b. Paid the rightful owners their due and royalties.
c. Taken legal action against the Original Seller for selling stolen goods.
Rather they decided to harass the customer.
Maybe he bought it himself? Or maybe his parents have a lot of money. If I had the money, I'd buy one of these in a heartbeat, and then torrent all my school books to it. $400 for a book I'm going to read parts of one time for a class I'll have for 4 months? That's bull.
Amazon has apologized profusely for doing this and restored the books. That's life kid. Lay off the video games for a couple of nights and go do your homework again. There are real problems for the courts to deal with.
Maybe you don't understand this but he owns the notes that Amazon deleted. And I don't just mean licensed them, I mean OWNS them, rights and all. They violated copyright by deleting his notes, so he has a legitimate legal standing I'd say.
Sorry. I give the kid no sympathy.
EVERYONE has lost some piece of vital information at one point. From a computer crash, a blackout, or some hardware that breaks on you when you least expect it. He should have been backing all of his stuff as soon as possible on some other media--if not ALREADY writing his report as he goes.
Worse is that this is only a highschool paper. how much could that be? 5 pages, double spaced? Peanuts!
Also, if he were really paying attention, he would already know what he's writing about and where to find it in the book as soon as he gets his new copy.
@Mark: I don't think they did violate copyright. To violate copyright, you have to make a copy of something; they didn't. Deleting the only copy may be some other tort, of course.
When you read a hard copy of a book, do you bring to in case one gets damaged and your liner notes are gone?
Didn't think so.
Go Go Gawronski
... You do realize Amazon intentionally, and without his permission, went into his device and deleted his book and his own notes along with it right? If he wrote them down on paper and a worker from the paper company broke into his house and erased it would you say the same thing? It's unreasonable for anyone to expect or plan for such things.
Though I question his motives, I really hope he wins. The big thing here is that companies have NO business remotely accessing our devices. I buy the device I can do with it what I like, the courts need to stop this now!
Sure they can, if it's part of the agreement under which you bought the device. I don't know the particulars about the Kindle, but if part of the conditions of the seller (i.e. Amazon) selling the device to you is that they will have the ability to remotely access your device to perform certain actions then by purchasing the device you are agreeing to these terms; your alternative is to buy a different product.
Unless there's already some existing regulation that is applicable in this instance, which may be (there are countless regulations), in which case taking it to court is reasonable.
Digital mediums are always unreliable for any kind of data storage. If you look from this angle, kid should take a backup of his annotations, although I have no idea if it is possible at all with Kindle.
On the other hand, this wasn't a malfunction of the digital storage device but a deliberate action of removing user's content from the device, because of a design error, and I am not talking about the book itself. Kindle should be designed such a way that it saves the notes you take on a separate file so deleting a book would not delete the notes. In the end notes are user's property, created by the user itself. From that angle, he/she can win the case easily (IANAL).
As I mentioned above, Kindle does save notes and highlights in a separate file.
http://www.planetebook.com/free-ebooks.asp
Bang. Ok people - this is really going too far. Amazon is not the end-all be-all of book distribution. People need to quit being so litigious. Just because you had a thought to sue someone, doesn't mean it's the right thing to do.
The issue isn't that he lost the book, it's that he lost his notes that he had been taking in the book when Amazon broke into his device and deleted it. Now if you can find me an ebook version of the notes he took, word for word, then I might agree with you.
Midget: "Is this a friend of yours?"
Chico: "I should say not, he's a lawyer!"
----Marx Brothers- 'At the Circus'
I actually never knew that the Amazon had remote access to the Kindle until the whole incident took place. It's really sad and scary at the same time. I hope he wins. It's sad to think that we fork hundreds of dollars for a device, and then pay -even further- to purchase books which are ultimately accessible by an entity that is located hundreds of miles away from where we are.
If this Jeff douche has access to people's Kindles and their ebooks that they've purchased, then users of Kindles should have access to their money in Amazon's bank account so that when consumers change their mind after purchasing an ebook, they can just freely retrieve their money whenever without leaving a trace of it whatsoever, not even the pennies and nickels.
Apple can do the same thing with iPone apps.
I guess that's the catch when you have non-removable batteries eh?
If Amazon didn't have the ability to remove books from devices, they wouldn't be able to do refunds. Moreover, they aren't digging into people's devices. They removed the books from the accounts, and the software did the business itself. If you've been following the stories, Amazon is already working on making the software more selective in this regard. It sucks that he lost his notes, but acting like a high school book report's notes are worth more than dirt is ridiculous. If those notes were so valuable, he should've put them in an actual file and backed them up, as one should do with all electronic documents.
The kid has an interesting case, but it will be hard for him to prove the amount of notes he actually lost. I do hope he wins.
If they go by the precedents set by the RIAA trials, he doesn't need to prove much. Loss is implied.
Why does this have to go straight to court though, is there any mention of the kid trying to contact Amazon first to resolve the situation? Don't get me wrong, I'm much less likely to purchase a Kindle after this latest Orwell fiasco but I think screaming for blood and dragging this into the courts seems a little extreme considering what's been lost here. I'd say at most he should expect to receive an apology and a hefty credit for some free e-books.
Well, we don't know. Personally, I don't think the following scenario is unlikely. Kid contacts Amazon, Amazon employee doesn't get it and gives non-commital/senseless answer, kid thinks "screw this".
That's basically my M.O. these days - I write/call once and state my grievance. If not appropriate steps are being taken, I escalate to the next level. I'll note that I never had to this with face-to-face dealings. Bring in a slightly off chicken - the respectable seller who lucked out once apologies profoundly and gets me another one, for example.
To be fair, I found Amazon's service also always quite exceptional. Even in rare cases (like when they sent the complete calvin and hobbes over the pond, inadequately packed) they managed to resolve the matter to my complete satisfaction.
His notes were effectively his, not Amazon's to delete. I'm sure somewhere in the Kindle fine print, there is a clause that they may deactivate any purchase blah blah blah legalese. However, his notes should have been spared as they are not within Amazon's domain. If anything, Amazon should have notes saved to a document that remains on the Kindle if the publication is deleted.
i will be praying 3 times a day that this case gets class action status and that Amazon gets it's proverbial d*ck slapped into the dirt!
How would you like it if you were carrying eggs in a basket for 2 months (Summer project) and I just came and stole them all?
$50 says your first though wouldn't be "I should have used two baskets!"
This brings the whole Netshare thing on the App Store to memory. Apple did it the right way. Pulled the app, but didn't delete those that had already downloaded it. Imagine the outcry if Apple had pulled an Amazon?
AMAZON DIDNT DELETE HIS NOTES!!!!!!!
I hate to be the one to tell you all this but this story has one problem with it, his notes weren't deleted! If he plugs the Kindle into his computer he can grab all the notes from the file it is still stored on since all notes taken on the kindle get stored inside of a single text file. It just wont have the placement in the book nor can it be accessed through the kindle since notes can only be accessed inside the books on the device.