Over the weekend, we posted a link to a NYT story about an embarrassing—and some say—bit of creepy corporate superstate power: Amazaon slipped into a hundreds of customers' Kindle accounts and took back copies—ironically—of George Orwell's 1984 and Animal Farm . (Amazon didn't have the  rights to the books, and so had initially offered them against copyright law.)



Little did I know, PubliCola's own TechNerd, Glenn Fleishman, had filed a report on the story in TidBITS , a Mac news site, over the weekend as well.

I'm glad to see Fleishman get into the issue I had brought up in the comments thread on our post about the Amazon story. Glenn points out to people who were so righteously outraged about Amazon's heavy handed play, that, in fact, Apple's popular  iTunes has already set a creepy precedent when it comes to digital ownership.

The issue at hand? Digital Rights Management aka, Digital Restriction Management, or DRM.

Glenn wrote:

What Rights We Mortals Have -- When we buy a physical book in the United States, we have the right to possess it forever, pass it on to heirs as part of an estate, burn or deface it, loan it and expect its return, donate it, and resell it. The new owner has the same set of rights. (Notably, those rights weren't always crystal clear; the first-sale doctrine that allows resale, for instance, has been litigated, but upheld.)

When we purchase digital media, whether music, video, or books, we are nearly always purchasing a license, not obtaining ownership. We typically, but not always, cannot resell what we buy, because we're obtaining a perfect digital copy. That implies that a publisher or rights holder can't be sure that we've deleted a work when we pass it on, even though there are ways to ensure that in systems that restrict the right to pass works on.

Apple's iTunes Store agreement is pretty typical, in that it says we receive specific non-commercial, personal rights to playback limited by digital rights management technology. For iTunes Plus music, which is DRM-free and all that Apple now offers for music, you're asked to self-limit what you do.

But Apple's agreement has a nifty little statement in it that has long made some people wary of buying anything from the company - despite the billions of songs sold so far:

"Apple and its licensors reserve the right to change, suspend, remove, or disable access to any Products, content, or other materials comprising a part of the Service at any time without notice."


Which means: "It may seem like you bought it and it's yours, but we can remove stuff from your phone, computer, or iPod, and we don't even have to tell you why or alert you ahead of time."