Striking features highlighted by the article include:
The lack of a second-hand market - you can't resell your digital content once you are done with it the way you can with a record album, book or video game disc.
The power of the licensing company to retract the content. In this case they seem to realize it was a bad decision and are taking all kinds of heat for it, and a refund was given, but for the 17 year old kid quoted in the article who had all his notes and annotations for a school assignment deleted as well, that's pretty horrible and he has no recourse.
International copyright law issues - In the United States the copyright to "1984" has not yet expired, but in other countries it has already entered the public domain.
But what really gets me thinking is the reference to Amazon's Terms of Service. Terms of Service have always bugged me. With a physical product you pretty much know the terms: you pay for it, it's yours. A restaurant's terms are likewise well known: they feed and serve you, you pay. Subscription services begin to get hazier, like your gym membership, cable television or cell phone, but even there the worst that can happen is that you're locked into paying the duration of a contract whether you use the service or not. It's in the online digital realm that TOS really get arcane. The uniqueness and strangeness of these sorts of TOS are compounded by the fact that they are rarely read. Everytime a new patch is added to a popular online game I play, I am asked to re-confirm my acknowledgement of the Terms of Service. I didn't read them the first time, I certainly don't re-read the three pages of fine print every time the game is patched. Only my assumption that there can't be anything ridiculous within the terms consoles me.
And that's where most people are. They don't pay much attention to the TOS because they assume that if they contained any outrageous offenses, either someone who is paying more attention would stir up a fuss or the terms would never hold up to scrutiny.
In the end whenever you have to agree to a Terms of Service it's generally good practice to assume that you have no rights and that your access to the provider's service is at their pleasure. The Kindle is that rare object that occupies a space in which that sort of surrender is hard to swallow, both because it mimics a physical object that has no such restrictions and because it seemingly follows a similar model to online music downloads. I would be shocked and dismayed to find that iTunes had deleted content from my personal computer. The realization that the Kindle may physically belong to the owner, but that all its contents exist at the discretion of Amazon is a shocking one.
Looking to the future I find it hard to believe that such a model could persist indefinitely. The concept of ownership is too important to humans (at least to Americans) to fade completely away as the digital age matures. Instead that distinction between owning and renting will probably become further defined in future products. Amazon's dilemma in this case is that their customers assumed they owned their purchases, and their legal team viewed them instead as indefinite rentals that Amazon still held responsibility for after the purchase had been made. Long term I don't see how Amazon's definition can hold up, and I think some other perspective will have to gain dominance, even if it isn't based on copyright over the data itself but instead on fees for transmission or hosting. After all, devices like the Kindle can still make money as a pay-for-download device if Amazon controls the means for putting information on the device - no matter whether the content is public domain or copyrighted. This is just another example of the old fashioned notions of copyright bumping up against the realities of digital media.
