[kstrauser]

> Yes, it has. They made it clear right when they launched the store.

No one except those who explicitly went looking for this knew it. It wasn't made clear in any way.

> This became big news a long time ago:

Speaking of orthogonal. I remember this well. It was a case where Amazon stole back books people had purchased. The core concern at the time wasn't that Amazon had revoked a license to read a book, but that they had deleted purchased books from users' collections.

But at the end of the day, for many years Amazon had an action button saying "Buy now with 1-Click" with no legal fiction disclaimer. The button was identical to what you'd see when buying a bag of cat food, DVD, or anything else you'd flat-out purchase from them.

[BeetleB]

I'm neither disputing the verbiage on the button, nor the ignorance of users. None of those affects the fact that you did not own the ebook - it was licensed to you.

What is silly is actually knowing the whole 1984 episode, and still believing you owned the books.

[smeej]

> "These books were added to our catalog using our self-service platform by a third-party who did not have the rights to the books," spokesman Drew Herdener told the Guardian. "When we were notified of this by the rights holder, we removed the illegal copies from our systems and from customers' devices, and refunded customers."

> Amazon refunded the cost of the books, but told affected customers they could no longer read the books and that the titles were "no longer available for purchase".

This has nothing to do with people's having bought a license to the books. It's about Amazon's never having had authorization from the publisher to sell the books. There is no reference at all to people's having licensed the books from Amazon. Amazon referred to people as having bought the books.