(After all, those purchase buttons usually say BUY, not BUY A LICENSE.) Advertisementįortunately, though, there’s an easy way to ensure you can avoid the same fate as Nygaard. It's a distinction many Ars readers may already understand, but it's less apparent outside the ranks of the tech-savvy. Many other websites also lamented that many digital retailers (Amazon, Apple, and plenty of others) are not selling digital goods, but rather license them. More likely, Amazon turns a blind eye to most people who fall into this category.)Īmazon declined to respond to media queries (including those from Ars) as to exactly what Nygaard, an IT consultant, had done to prompt the company’s wrath. (For two years, my wife and I regularly bought e-books for our US-bought Amazon Kindle while we were living in Germany-I can’t believe that we just got lucky. Many speculated that because she was buying content licensed for the UK from Norway, Nygaard somehow ran afoul of Amazon’s licensing deals. 'They claimed that they worked in .uk and would give me a new Kindle, but they would not talk to me about my account.'

'I have not heard anything from Amazon about this, except that I got a very strange phone earlier from someone with a hidden number,' Nygaard told Norwegian broadcaster NRK. That move was reversed (Google Translate) about 24 hours later, with access to her Kindle account restored. This week, Amazon suddenly disabled her account, taking away her access to an e-book library of 40 books. She bought a Kindle in the United Kingdom, took it home to Norway, and bought UK e-books on the Kindle. This week’s case involves a Norwegian woman (Google Translate) named Linn Nygaard. (The company did it before, ironically, with George Orwell’s 1984, back in 2009.) Over the past week, the tech world has been abuzz with news that-surprise, surprise-Amazon can remotely wipe any Kindle, at any time, for effectively any reason. Yes, many parts of the Internet have known about this technique for some time now, but we feel that it bears mentioning again here. If you buy e-books from Amazon and want to engage in a bit of digital civil disobedience-by stripping the files’ DRM and making sure that Amazon can’t deny you access-we’re about to show you how.

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