Hi there,

Saw you’d written about the Amazon / 1984 flap, and I thought you might be interested in the petition we launched yesterday:

http://defectivebydesign.org/amazon1984

We have over 1400 signatures already, and signers include Lawrence Lessig, Clay Shirky, Cory Doctorow and other notable authors, librarians, and scholars.

The petition opens:

“We believe in a way of life based on the free exchange of ideas, in which books have and will continue to play a central role. Devices like Amazon’s are trying to determine how people will interact with books, but Amazon’s use of DRM to control and monitor users and their books constitutes a clear threat to the free exchange of ideas.”

Please have a look, and if you support the cause or think it would be interesting to your readers, a blog post would be great!

Thanks,

-Holmes Wilson Free Software Foundation

Real good example here! In the late 80’s XTC was leagal, and common place being as bars were just giving it away, but…. ?

I fully understand that law has to catch up to changing times, but that never really matters in the fundamental difference between right, and wrong. Amazon had not right to do it they way they did. Not even a common place and believed to be legal user agreement gave them the right to do what they did how they did it. The masses crying “It’s legal, You’re a Loon, Conspiracy nut, and ******” Only showed they believe themselves to be smarter than they truly are, because they couldn’t have an open and honest adult conversation. I didn’t once call names. I just thought that rational adults would not need things spelled out by grabbing a book when it comes to peoples civil liberties being whittled away. I never once said the Government was behind it. I said they were missing the true irony of the situation, and they were. Why were they? Well because Amazon should have sent out a alert (if kindles can get those), or made a public statement saying they need users to logged in and trade the book for a legitimate copy for free, and for those with personal notes attached to the file should have been provided a way to retrieve them and transfer to the replacement copy. OH, but that is not how it went down. They entered a back door they purposefully left in, but did not openly make customers aware of. This your just leasing it with a license. That’s BS just because something is digital doesn’t mean once I pay for it, it’s not really mine. The reason people felt like I was on a soapbox was because they were not open minded, and were not really reading what I was writing, they were skimming it. They were behaving like junior high kids that only pretend to listen in class.

Vigilance knows not of apathy. <— that simple statement will completely escape most of them. Bob I am chomping at the bit to be able to bring that case to court, but I can’t. They didn’t infringe on my rights, so I have no legal leg to stand on. I beg Apple to come get me for my jailbroken iPhone, but they won’t. They might someone else. When companies first started including legal documentaion with products it was to say “Hey if you use this product in way of than the way it was intended you can’t sue us when it goes on a rampage and kills your family”. So people got used to it. they didn’t bother to read it, because it was written very plainly, and didn’t take way the consumers rights. Now days they sneak all this amazing dung in there like ( http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v625/geauxracerx/FSM/iTunes-WTF-2.jpg ) Have a look. They also sneak in a way to infringe on your civil liberties.

I was referred to as a troll the internet meaning a right winger that trolls left wing blogs to inflame and irritate. Where did I ever say This new administrations, or damn leftists brainwashed zombies! I did say Lemmings, because they certainly were not thinking for them selves. I wasn’t pushing any agenda save that of just plain right and just.

Law is made by law makers, and from my window I can see they are not looking out for me or any of the other none law makers I can see walking the face of the planet. This isn’t a left right thing. It’s a we are people, we are Americans. We have rights, and Amazon grossly violated those rights. They way it happen was well Orwellian, and it being coupled with it actually occurring with Orwell’s books should have be an obvious WTF moment that caused every single intelligent American to say “Whoa I really need to take a deep long look at whats going on around me right now!”, because it’s not just this one thing. It’s lots of little things. Well news flash little things add up pretty quickly.

One of my best friend before I moved to where I live now all through his studies at laws school would come over smoke and we would talk, about the law. I helped him write his papers. He was constantly trying to get me to enroll, and become a lawyer. The reason I wouldn’t even consider it, was because I have no patience for People taken advantage of other people, are hurting them, and I hadn’t yet learned to control the temp having to fist fight with my drunken father to keep him from beating my brother and mother on a regular basis. To this day even with hundreds of miles and years between us. When he just feels lost in a case he calls, because I can always come up with an angle that if not is the piece he was missing, then it’s the piece that leads him to the path he needed to take. It’s very well likely it’s my fault that because I don’t have to even think of citing anything to him I assumed I could have an adult conversation with people. The first thing that tipped him off was that I asked “Hey we live in Texas, and it’s still legal to hang someone if you catch them stealing your horses right?” He said “Damn Straight!” TO which I replied, Well my sport bike out side is referred to as a steel horse right?” He said “Yeah that’s commonly used enough to be a legal term why?” So I said, “So if some jerk was outside steeling my bike, and I hung him for it, would you defend me, and could we win?” He was all over it. I have a very good grasp on the law, but I’m still a layman, and I know for a fact unless I am entering into a contract with an individual Which means myself and another “person” that’s 9 times out of 10 a verbal contract, because one that’s been drawn up by one lawyer that’s going to have to advise me to go get a lawyer myself, because with out a lawyer on my side it would be an illegitimate contract. So until a major corporation wrongs me or anyone that is aware of this it’s just going to stay the same, or smart people can see this very occurrence as a chance to stand up and unite, and take back their rights. We haven’t een discussed that fact that minors can not be held to contracts at all, and they click agree in the user agreement. I really think a few people in this thread need to be seriously ashamed of them selves, and sit down and think real hard about what they are told , and what is really going on around them. Any one so heck bent on believing one side or another of a political rift that they will not even listen to someone they just think is on the other side, and dismiss needs to realize they might view themselves as a rational person, but in truth they aren’t. You can’t be rational if you are not truly open minded.

I’m so adamant on this point, because I care about everyone rights, not just mine. Not just those that Convenience me, because this was in now way a convenience. We could have had a rational debate, if people hadn’t sought to label me one thing or another, and try vigorously to anger me. Look back of the thread. I didn’t and tell me where I made personal attacks.

tkd27 we didn’t have written laws saying White men can own other people so long as they aren’t other white men. It was just common place and there for viewed as legal. We had to fight a war when some proposed we write laws to state is was illegal. You don’t write laws to verify things are legal, unless you are writing a law to relegalize it. ie prohibition. But when something like XTC that was “legal” because it was a completely new compound that found it’s way to the street in a matter of months not years of medical trials or experiments. Some chemist and psychologists got together and made it not a major drug company. Since a major pharmaceutical company didn’t make it it wasn’t a scheduled substance, thus no penalties for it’s manufacturing distributing and selling, and possession . Not consuming per se, because that’s public intoxication, different charge. So back before they made it a scheduled substance, and wrote laws stating it was illegal. A cop would just take your stash, and maybe take you in on public intoxication. So slavery wasn’t legal. it was just common place. We did how ever since it was common place have laws to protect the slave owners “property”.

I’m not the one that needs to get educated here, but that is in direct correlation to why so many others are so rudely proving they do. I guess another reason I don’t feel the need to cite things heavily is I expect people to be smart, but if most people were smart those Ditech commercials wouldn’t work at all. You know. “People are smart, and smart people blah….” well truth is 93% of the populace is not smart. They are average, and mediocre. When tell a smart person they are smart they just look at you like “And….. What do you want?”

But if this story just fades away……….. And nothing comes of it. Then I really fear what follows. You have to look at the whole picture. Today it’s just a small intrusion, and theft of your property. It’s property, because the kindle is an e-book reader for reading books. So when you bought the e-book you were buying a book. They can’t just take it through some built in back door.

Here let me put it in an extremely relevant manner. The dev team has recently been having issues with push notifications, because all iPhone data passes through Apples servers. So it checks to see if the device is legit or not. IF your on an official carrier it’s like “Kewl have at it.” But if your on a unofficial carrier the requests you send or are sent to your device are held until the device or senders network times out. Now that in it’s self well that’s ok i guess, but that also means all your data travels through one single data base, which theoretically can be gathered and monitored very easily. Not saying it is. just would be easy, but it would give an very interesting reason for China to say “Hey round eyes, no wifi on iPhone!” because push doesn’t take advantage of your wifi. It uses cellular and in fact uses the SMS protocols. There were issues early after the App store release with app that were incorrectly using the invisible SMS protocols for data sending and receiving. At this same time Apple had apps like Loopt and WeatherBug remove the disclaimer of “This app uses the SMS protocol to send and receive data so watch your SMS usage levels if you are on a limited SMS plan” It’s fact that recently a hacker won awards for exposing the hole left open by the SMS protocol of the iPhone. Heres your citation

http://www.theiphoneblog.com/2009/07/03/ihacker-charlie-discloses-iphone-sms-security-vulnerability/

It’s the same exact hole that apps use to send and receive data. Dude didn’t discover it. He just was the first to make it known main stream.

This in the jailbreak community is known as the Apple Kill Switch exploit.

Tyler Says:

July 17th, 2009 at 7:01 pm

Yes, they did it to the iPhone version of kindle. They took back my copy of 1984. Luckily I had finished reading it, so I guess I got to read it for free.

So that means Apple also has a very active back door in the iPhone at all times. Since some one felt the need to call me a conspiracy theory nut. I’ll just run with that for a second. I got a good imagination. OK so Apple has a a constant backdoor into your device, and their user agreement gives them right to enter it and do as they please. Right? It’s legal because we clicked it remember. So that then gives them the right to do anything else they want while inside our devices at any time, for any reason. It’s not like they could turn on the mic or the camera or gps. OH wait that iPhone blog link up there did mention all those utilities being possibly remotely used. It’s not like Apple has any government contracts. I mean there are no stores of Apple devices being used by military in the field. I know for a fact if you search Engadget you won’t find any, and none have ever been pulled from Engadget. So lets not get away from this being hypothetical. IT’s also not like a company Pystar ever brought Anti Trust claims charges against Apple and they were thrown out of court for shortly after Anti Trust claims to again be files because Apple and Google were sharing board members. I mean we all know there’s no way two major corporations with teams of highly paid lawyers would make such a blatant over sight of the law. I mean they even teach that you can’t be on competing corporation s boards at the same time in high school business classes. I’m sure that Google and Apple didn’t give a lame excuse like “We forgot, and besides they never attended both at the same time, or discussed things about deal we were in competition about. That wasn’t in the news recently any way right. so just forget I mentioned it. I mean throwing out Anti trust charges in a case against Apple because it’s just not happening, and then shortly News of it being true would have been every where. I mean at least crazy fanatical fox would have covered that, and they didn’t so we can all agree I’m just talking hypothetical here, but man now that would be a good one. Heck it’s not like Apple, Google, and Amazon do any business together, and It’s not like one of those companies recently stepped all over anyone’s civil liberties, because the government would have made a statement about that if they had right. I mean at least the attorney general would have said something about peoples civil liberties being violated.

See I could half A$$ a story if I had to.

All I am saying is Bob is right we have to be vigilant to protect ourselves.

personally, I think It would be interesting to see such a case held in court. technology has enabled publishers with powers that were unthinkable 100 years ago. It would be a great opporunity to see our constituion in action and how laws of ownership are interpretated in this modern age, when instead if owning something as tangible as paper, we lay claim to ownership of a sea of electrons pulsing on and off.

Under NAIS, you register your premises, even if you own even one animal, even if it is a pet. This step clouds title to private property. All critters must be microchipped and all births, deaths and movements reported into a database. This costs time and money. Factory farms do NOT have to do this, they get one lot number per group of animals. Any animal in that group could be diseased and who would know. But if animal disease is suspected in an area, the USDA can depopulate a 6 mile radius (140 sq. miles of dead healthy animals).

NAIS will not prevent animal disease nor ensure food safety since tracking stops at slaughter, after which is when food safety issues occur.

I asked the customer representative where this information was available and he told me that it’s in the fine print of the legalese agreement documentation. “It’s not right that they are in bold print when you buy a book?” I asked. “No, I don’t believe so. You have to look for it.”

Here’s what the Amazon CSR told Dan.

I asked the customer representative where this information was available and he told me that it's in the fine print of the legalese agreement documentation. "It's not right that they are in bold print when you buy a book?" I asked. "No, I don't believe so. You have to look for it."

Amazon has given two different reasons. When there can only be one.

You Cheeb say “(not saying this is right)” which means on some level inside you, you know it’s not right, and if something is not right it can not be legal. You can’t have it both ways. You can not be vigilant when you turn a blind eye, because it’s just too much trouble to fight for what’s just. You are picking a side only because it effects someone else, while leaving you unscathed. and only cowards that can not accept a spirited discussion resort to name calling. It also shows a sever lack of the ability to be open minded.

Only cowards resort to name calling.

Please direct me to where the Orwell estate has filed claims that the third party was pirating the books. Any decent journalist would have called the Orwell estate first. Not Amazon. Amazon does not have legal proxy over the estate.

The fact that Amazon did not first inform customers of the issues and offer to buy the books back shows lack of honesty, because that is the right thing to do. What Amazon should have done was just pull the books from their offerings,Then offer to buy the copies back,or offer them one from a different source. At which point the customer has the right to refuse or even demand a higher price that Amazon doesn’t have to agree to and leave it at that. No they didn’t take that route. They used an undisclosed backdoor into the device. I guess it’s a good thing GeoHot has now jailbroken the device so that owners can take control of it and prevent illegal entrance by little Amazon tech ninjas. If it’s legal for Amazon to take back content you paid for in good faith, then it’s legal for them to just come take the device at any time with no warning also, because the user agreement must obviously imply it’s not your device even though you bought it. IF you are leasing or renting the device it must be clearly stated at the signing. YOu all know darn well user agreements use law terms, and jargon that are specifically designed to hide information form anyone that does not have a complete grasp of the vernacular. It’s referred to as small print. Hers a quote from Amazon customer care Here’s what the Amazon CSR told Dan.

I asked the customer representative where this information was available and he told me that it's in the fine print of the legalese* agreement documentation. "It's not right that they are in bold print when you buy a book?" I asked. "No, I don't believe so. You have to look for it."  

• legalese – The specialized vocabulary of the legal profession, especially when considered to be complex or abstruse. legalese definition 2 – language containing an excessive amount of legal terminology or of legal jargon. Usually designed to hide incriminating clauses from the nonprofessional.

So you can see for Amazon representatives that openly admit to hiding information in there terms of use agreement specifically designed to lead consumers astray.

So now please tell me how this terms of agreement can be a legal binding contract if it’s admittedly designed to hide pertinent and damning information from the consumer. HOw can one honestly expect to any one that is not a lawyer to full understand what they are signing,

From the legalese wiki: Formality These features tend to make legal writing formal. This formality can take the form of long sentences, complex constructions, archaic and hyper-formal vocabulary, and a focus on content to the exclusion of reader needs. Some of this formality in legal writing is necessary and desirable, given the importance of some legal documents and the seriousness of the circumstances in which some legal documents are used. Yet not all formality in legal writing is justified. To the extent that formality produces opacity and imprecision, it is undesirable. To the extent that formality hinders reader comprehension, it is less desirable. In particular, when legal content must be conveyed to nonlawyers, formality should give way to clear communication.

So now tell me how a layman can enter into a contract with a corporation when the corporations is clearly and admittedly using legalese to hide pertinent information from the laymen for the express reason to conceal it’s true meaning.