Do you own the property you buy?

[tangaroa]

Here is a reminder that it is not enough to acquire a product, one does not really control it unless the product's delivery system and the ability to use it are controlled by the end user or by nobody at all: Amazon deleted e-books from the Kindle e-book readers of people who had paid for the e-books. It is news enough that Amazon has that power, but go read through the article for the story's kicker.

This is one of many minefields of the cheap-information economy. Consider also the DivX disc system which prevented users from seeing movies they bought without paying a fee every time, Microsoft's aborted plans to make the Windows computer operating system a subscription-based service that would require the payment of an annual fee to use a computer, software that shuts down if it cannot contact a central server and will become useless when the publisher goes out of business or decides to stop supporting it, and the ever-expanding terms of contracts which grant businesses greater control over people in all their dealings. I am sure there is something in the Kindle service contract which allows Amazon to do what it did, which would make it legal but still not right.

It is important to be aware that business is no longer as simple as a buyer and a seller, and that the terms of doing business in a new way might leave buyers without control of something important to them. People can keep their control by refusing to do business with companies that do not give them control of what they buy, or they may lose it by not caring. The reason that DivX and Microsoft's subscription idea died is that alternatives were available at a fair price which treated a bought product as a bought product, and the people would not have accepted the new order of business that Microsoft proposed and DivX tried to impose. Should such schemes be allowed to succeed in the marketplace and drive off competition, we would slide towards living in a dystopian future from science fiction.