October 1st, 2009
Can we let the Kindle/1984 thing go already?
$150,000. That’s how much Amazon has agreed to pay the kid whose Kindle ate his homework. Sure, he’s donating the money to charity after paying his legal fees, but really? $150,000? We get it already: Amazon still owns the books we all thought we were buying. All we’re doing is buying the right to look at them. Read the fine print and move on, folks.
$150,000 is a lot of money when the terms of service are hardly unclear. The 17-year old student in question told the Los Angeles Times,
“Amazon has just proven that when I buy a book on the Kindle, I don’t really own it,” the 17-year-old told The Times’ Mark Milian in July. “I just feel that is wrong.”
For that brilliant deduction and bit of whining he gets 150 grand?
Sure, Amazon made a bad PR move when they zapped copies of a couple Orwell books this summer. How about the settlement just include some provisions for better educational DRM? Maybe Amazon could lead the charge for licensing in educational institutions that made Kindles as practical as the stacks of books that can easily be shared and used by multiple students.
150 large minus legal fees? When the fine print still exists and schools are no closer to being able to use Kindles as 1:1 book collections for students? I’m not impressed.
Follow Chris Dawson on Twitter! Christopher Dawson is the technology director for the Athol-Royalston School District in northern Massachusetts and a member of the Internet Press Guild. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations, but always keep in mind that the opinions expressed here are his own and not those of his daytime employer, even if he talks incessantly about his day job.
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