Amazon’s DRM drama: Whose Kindle is it anyway?

We interrupt today’s endless cycle of election news, iPad Mini lovefests, and hate mail for the Microsoft Surface to bring you the tale of one tech firm behaving rather badly. That firm is Amazon, and this is far from the first time it’s been caught acting like a bully.

There’s a story crossing the Interwebs about a Norwegian woman named Linn Nygaard, who opened up her Kindle one morning recently to find she was unable to access any of the roughly 40 books it had contained. Surely, she thought, this was some kind of technical glitch. She contacted Amazon, but no — it appeared that Amazon had wiped the Kindle clean while she slept. The reason: The company determined that Linn’s account was “directly related to another which has been previously closed for abuse of [Amazon’s] policies,” so it closed her account.

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The problem? Nygaard had only one Amazon account. She wrote back, explaining there must be some mistake. She received an email from Michael Murphy, Amazon UK’s executive customer relations, stating:

As previously advised, your Amazon.co.uk account has been closed, as it has come to our attention that this account is related to a previously blocked account. While we are unable to provide detailed information on how we link related accounts, please know that we have reviewed your account on the basis of the information provided and regret to inform you that it will not be reopened.

Please understand that the closure of an account is a permanent action. Any subsequent accounts that are opened will be closed as well. Thank you for your understanding with our decision.

In other words, Amazon says she has multiple accounts, but it won’t tell her which ones they allegedly are. Think about that for a second. If Amazon is sure Nygaard was using multiple linked accounts, what is the harm is naming them, exactly? Wouldn’t she already know about them? And if she doesn’t already know about them, isn’t this a case of account hijacking where Nygaard is the victim and not the culprit?

First publicized by tech blogger Martin Bekkelund, Linn’s story found its way to my inbox via Yosem Company, a doctoral candidate at Stanford who runs the university’s Liberation Technology Program. It has since been retold at Forbes, BoingBoing, Gizmodo, the Huffington Post, and a dozen lesser blogs.

So far, Amazon remains officially mum on the matter. At publication time, the only response so far has been a cryptic note, posted to the Amazon support forum by a moderator named Josh W.:

We would like to clarify our policy on this topic. Account status should not affect any customer’s ability to access their library. If any customer has trouble accessing their content, he or she should contact customer service for help.

Which, of course, Nygaard already has, and we know how far that got her. For what it’s worth, that help forum is anything but helpful — there’s an amazing amount of hostility toward Nygaard and others who are asking legitimate questions: What could happen to the e-books I thought I owned? Are they really mine, or do they belong to Amazon?

Regular readers may recall this is hardly the first time that Amazon has been caught playing Big Brother with books purchased by its customers. Back in July 2009, Amazon made national headlines when it unilaterally erased thousands of copies of “1984” and “Animal Farm” from users’ Kindles, saying the publisher didn’t have the rights to sell those copies in the first place.

Orwellian, indeed.

Let’s say you go into your local Barnes & Noble, buy every John Grisham and Anne Rice book on the shelves, and bring them home. Later, the bookstore decides that you did something wrong — it won’t tell you what it is, but rest assured it was bad — so it breaks into your home in the middle of the night and takes all its books back. No notice, no permission, no refunds, and no explanation — the deed is done because you accepted some agreement you didn’t read that gave it that right.

(I’ve been looking on Amazon’s site for the language that grants this right, and so far I’ve come up empty. Anyone out there in Cringeville want to point me to it?)

Amazon had better be careful. When faced with a corporation bent on enforcing arcane rules that only benefit itself, people will invariably find a way to route around it. Jon Lech Johansen (aka DVD Jon) wrote his copy-protection cracking code not because he wanted to illegally distribute digital movies; he wrote it because he needed a workaround to DVD regional encoding that prevented him from watching movies he’d legally purchased overseas when he went home to Norway.

The same thing will happen to Amazon’s DRM. In fact, there are already tools that let you break the DRM. Smart users will find them — and so will copyright thieves.

Then again, perhaps this is all a big mistake. Some six weeks after the Orwell debacle, Amazon agreed to restore the deleted books and give its customers a $30 gift certificate as an apology. Jeff Bezos was forced to post a mea culpa about it — which I’m sure caused him to lose whatever hair he had left at the time — calling the move “stupid, pointless, and painfully out of line with our principles.”

Maybe Amazon will stop acting like a bureaucratic bully and actually try to figure out what went wrong here. Perhaps it’s all a silly misunderstanding. But it’d better act soon before more customers decide that DRM isn’t worth the hassle and seek less legal but more friendly alternatives.

[Update: According to a report by Norwegian news site NRK (and as reported by UK’s The Register), Nygaard’s account has been restored. We are still waiting for Amazon’s official explanation as to what happened, however.]

Should Amazon have the right to take back books you’ve paid for? Post your thoughts below or email me: cringe@infoworld.com.

This article, “Amazon’s DRM drama: Whose Kindle is it anyway?,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Follow the crazy twists and turns of the tech industry with Robert X. Cringely’s Notes from the Field blog, and subscribe to Cringely’s Notes from the Underground newsletter.