f8lee wrote:
Yes, sadly, the concept of Intellectual Property and how it is getting (mis)used by some of the big players is relatively new and, for obvious reasons, not something Bezos and his brethren want to publicize.
Apparently some years back (2008), folks who previously purchased "1984" for their Kindles discovered that Amazon had "retrieved" said copies (due to some sort of kerfuffle with the author's estate or something). Amazon reimbursed them and said they were sorry. Of course, those who purchased the hard copies of the book were not affected.
An interesting read is "The End of Ownership: Personal Property in the Digital Economy" by Aaron Perzanowski and Jason Schultz - where they essentially point out that the concept of "ownership" no longer means what people think. It's one thing that people believe they "bought" that copy of software for $10 or $1000 when in fact it has always been the case that the money was to purchase the right to use said software (thus the whining about Adobe's and others' subscription schemes falls on deaf ears to those who understand the realities), but when something like a book that you ostensibly "bought" is suddenly retracted because, well for whatever reason, it shakes your confidence in what it means to have "bought" that book.
The bigger lesson, particularly with the "free" services like Google, Facebook et al, is that you are not the customer...you are the product that they sell to their actual customers, who are the advertisers.
Yes, sadly, the concept of Intellectual Property a... (
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