Thomas Jefferson is allowed to boast, but Franklin didn't build his own house.

Jefferson's inventions are mostly one-offs, such as his house. Franklin's inventions scaled.

Simple: They forgot to invest in people who can lobby their side in Washington. Microsoft had the same problem in the 90'ies. If you aren't spending 20% of your income on lobbism as a big company, you are a sitting duck. A startup don't have to, since they are mostly invisible anyway.

Yes, this sucks and I would love a world in which it was not. Being realistic, however this is the way out of it.

Google has invested in lobbying - for at least the past few years. You can read a 2007 Washington Post article about it here: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/06...

It would have been careless for them to avoid this.

I don't run antivirus, instead I configured a secondary account and then removed the admin privileges on my primary one. This has the added effect of preventing Skype from installing annoying browser toolbars.

Chickens are better for that purposes, since their excrements are some of the best fertilizer around. They also smell better than the goat.

they have an annoying tendancy to destroy/tear up the grass though.

My guess is that it is actually illegal.

I don't know whether it is illegal. I am trying to figure out if this violates their TOS:

Upon your payment of the applicable fees set by Amazon, Amazon grants you the non-exclusive right to keep a permanent copy of the applicable Digital Content and to view, use, and display such Digital Content an unlimited number of times, solely on the Device or as authorized by Amazon"

Is that "or" a get-out clause? Because the first part seems to quite definitively rule out what they did.

A similar case, in which a comma allowed an escape from a 5-year contract:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/article838...

The most logical reading of the or is that you are allowed to display the content as many times as you want, and those displays may either be on the screen or in another manner that has been authorized by Amazon.

That said, I'm sure their lawyers will be able to spin it as meaning that they grant you the right to keep the copy as authorized by them.

Is a TOS a legally binding contract?

It is most definitely not illegal.

When you "purchase a book" from the kindle store, all you are actually purchasing is a license to view the book that is bound by amazon's terms of use.

Criminally illegal, no. But that leaves open civil suits, which are sure to come.

1) You can sue anyone for anything. The US does not have a "loser pays" rule, though frivolous lawsuits can include attorney's fees.

2) Class action lawsuits are very profitable for lawyers when they win. They need to convince a jury of 12 people who couldn't get out of jury duty that "Big Corporation" was wrong. They get a percentage of the total judgment.

My guess is that some lawyer will pick this one up. They'll sue Amazon based on "common sense" and Amazon will realize that a jury isn't going separate a "book" from an "e-book". The plaintiff's lawyers will equate it to removing a book from your bookshelf in your house.

Amazon will argue commas in their TOS or Amazon will settle. On top of it all, Amazon demonstrates why I purchased a netbook instead of a Kindle for my e-book reading pleasure ... and why I don't buy e-books that I can't remove the DRM from.

[edit] since I can't edit the original due to replies.

I still think they stand a good chance of a class action lawsuit. The likelihood of it succeeding is less since it sounds like the issue relates to "who really owned the copyright" and they had to take down the content due to that ambiguity or fraud.

I concur - bonehead handling by Amazon perhaps, Exhibit A to why the copyright laws might need reforming, but not likely to lead to legal liabilities for Amazon given that they refunded everybody's payments.

Amazon needs to make its licensing policies clear up front and not bury them in fine print.

I may not like it when I only get a license that might be yanked, but I'll be a lot less upset about it the day it is yanked if I did the deal with open eyes at the start.

Though Amazon may be technically correct, it deserves the drubbing it is getting by failing to make its DRM policies clear up front to its customers.

It obviously obscured this issue to ensure that the issue would not harm Kindle sales. Now that this bomb has exploded, Kindle sales will be hurt anyway.

Don't mark down his comment just b/c you disagree with it. He's accurate about the legal import of "buying" an e-book from Amazon.

He wrote it in 1948, which is post Mickey so it is still under copyright.

Not that it matters, as you pointed out.

It's still under copyright in the US and UK, but not in Canada, where the copyright was "only" the author's life plus 50 years.

http://www.netcharles.com/orwell/info.htm

I don't mind what you do - nor do I think the parent does - but techchrunch is not a porn site, and it is not a blog about porn, when they write about porn it annoys those who come there to read tech news.

The porn industry has a lot of early adopters. How they're using a technology is a good leading indicator of how everyone else is going to use it.

We went to Iraq, didn't we? I'd say we forgot him straightaway.

Good point. Only fools fall into the same trap twice.

Millions of Americans served in Vietnam. I think the veterans will never forget nor forgive McNamara. He shall be remembered as the architect of one of the greatest crimes in History.

> Good point. Only fools fall into the same trap twice

Fool me once, shame on ... shame on you. Fool me ... you can't get fooled again

The very reason they did this is that inflation is currently negative -- that is, Sweden is suffering deflation. Money stuffed into a mattress appreciates in value as time passes.

to fight inflation you raise interest rates, so that citizens spend less and save more.

by cutting interesting rates they are encouraging spending, and increasing inflation!

they can of course just move their saving elsewhere (another country) where rates are better! Which is what I would do, at least in the short term!

yes, like Iceland. Oh, wait...

Can you explain how that is possible? In my understanding, if the interest rate is negative then the bank is, in other words, charging you a fee to keep your money there plus you are still taking a hit from inflation so at least if you take all your money out of the bank you are only taking the hit from inflation and not having to pay the bank a monthly fee to do so.

In a word: Deflation.

Even then leaving your money in the bank at a negative interest rate would not be better than having it in a mattress discounting physical theft risks of course.

You get a job because you want to make money. Whether you write Java stuff for bigcorp a or bigcorp b doesn't matter, they are going to require the same skills so they are "commodity" work places. You get a job there because you love to code and would like to make money. In short, you love to work.

Now, there are a few exceptions, of course, such as Frog Creek or your dream job, where you get a job because you love to work there.