This article appeared in today’s Wired.co.UK. It relates the story of a woman who ran afoul of Amazon rules and found her Kindle wiped clean remotely…something Amazon reserves the right to do. While this is unlikely to ever happen to you or me or even anyone we know, it’s still the kind of thing that makes me even more paranoid…
Imagine having every book on your Kindle remotely wiped, with no way to get it back. If you’ve invested hundreds or even thousands of pounds, that may seem frightening, if unlikely. Yet it’s exactly what happened to one Amazon customer in Europe. And even more shockingly, it was apparently the company itself responsible for deleting her library.
According to Linn Nygaard, an IT consultant living in Norway, Amazon remotely wiped her Kindle and closed her Amazon account for as yet unspecified violations to its terms of service. It’s frightening evidence that when you buy into an ecosystem built on DRM, while you may own your device, you don’t own the data that lives on it.
Amazon did not return Wired.com’s call for comment (Note: See update below) but it is relatively easy to parse what has happened here. For whatever reason, it seems Nygaard ran afoul of Amazon’s rules. (It seems likely that it was because she was using her Kindle in Norway to buy content licensed in the UK.) Based on that, Amazon decided to close her account. And here’s the thing, when it does that, it can then revoke the licence its customers have bought that allows them to read books. That’s what this controversy is ultimately about: licensing.