Student gets $150,000 rebate for Kindle copy of 1984
When Amazon remotely deleted copies of 1984 from its Kindle readers, it may have expected to take a hit in its public image. But it surely won’t have expected to take a $150,000 dent in its wallet.
That’s the amount the company has paid to settle a claim brought by one student who said the notes he’d made on the book were now worthless.
Justin Gawronski filed the suit in August after Amazon deleted copies of Orwell’s dystopian classic after discovering that it was still subject to copyright in the U.S. Deleting the book without warning prompted much criticism, which was hardly helped by the book in question dealing with an all-powerful authoritarian regime.
Amazon’s founder Jeff Bozos described the deletion as “stupid, thoughtless, and painfully out of line with our principles” and offered affected customers the choice of a free replacement copy of the book (with the relevant royalties going to the copyright holders) or a $30 gift certificate.
That wasn’t enough for Gawronski, who said he had made extensive electronic notes which were now useless because the way the Kindle works meant he had no way of telling which parts of the text they referred to.
As part of the settlement, obtained by TechFlash, Amazon has agreed that in future it will only delete book content from the Kindle where a user asks for a refund, a card payment is declined, a court orders them to do so, or there’s a reasonable security need to do so. However, it isn’t admitting any wrongdoing or legal liability.
The $150,000 settlement is made on condition that the share taken by Gawronski’s lawyers will go to charity. It’s not stated in the settlement how much Gawronski and a co-claimant will actually receive, if anything.
While a loss of sorts for Amazon, the case doesn’t hold any legal bearing on any similar claims: there has been no ruling that it is liable for any damages caused by deleting books. Given it was a screw-up that didn’t leave anyone financially or physically harmed, it would be tough to argue that $150,000 wasn’t a steep enough price in itself.
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October 3rd, 2009
I just don’t understand why the morons at Amazon didn’t just pay the royalties to the rights holder and leave the books alone on devices.