<story><title>Amazon Won’t Pay Self-Published Author For Books It Mistakenly Gave Away</title><url>http://paidcontent.org/article/419-amazon-wont-pay-self-published-author-for-books-it-mistakenly-gave-away/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>toyg</author><text>&quot;If these were physical books&quot;, there would be a material loss involved: Publisher A paid to produce X books, the distributor lost part of them, and now the Publisher cannot sell them anymore, suffering a direct and quantifiable economic loss.&lt;p&gt;Here, it&apos;s more like the distributor left their books around in a library, and some people got to read them for free. The publisher can still sell them. There is no direct loss, the damage is hardly quantifiable (it might actually turn out to be a net positive in the end, given all this free publicity).&lt;p&gt;The digital world is funny like that.&lt;p&gt;EDIT: this is not to say that Amazon shouldn&apos;t be held accountable for their mistake, if there is a breach of contract involved; just that it doesn&apos;t matter whether there were 6000 downloads or 60.</text></item><item><author>wccrawford</author><text>Amazon should own up and pay.  They have effectively stolen from this author.  No, we can&apos;t guarantee that those people would have bought it for free, but if these were physical books, the law would require that they pay the author.&lt;p&gt;The agreement wasn&apos;t that they get to change the price any time they like.  The agreement was that they get to match competitors.  They violated that.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jerf</author><text>Never use metaphors for online issues. They simply don&apos;t apply, the online world has far too many differences from the physical world for them to ever work. It isn&apos;t like &quot;leaving books around a library&quot;, it is like &quot;digital online content was accidentally priced for free when it shouldn&apos;t have been and some people downloaded them&quot;. This isn&apos;t such a complicated situation that we need metaphors to navigate the morass, not that they ever help anyhow since it inevitably causes people to get distracted by arguing over which inapplicable metaphor is more accurate instead of simply addressing the question at hand.&lt;p&gt;What &lt;i&gt;really&lt;/i&gt; matter here is the breach of contract. The contract specified when Amazon can drop the price, that condition was not met, they dropped the price. Apologies or blaming computers are not what is called for here.</text></comment>
<story><title>Amazon Won’t Pay Self-Published Author For Books It Mistakenly Gave Away</title><url>http://paidcontent.org/article/419-amazon-wont-pay-self-published-author-for-books-it-mistakenly-gave-away/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>toyg</author><text>&quot;If these were physical books&quot;, there would be a material loss involved: Publisher A paid to produce X books, the distributor lost part of them, and now the Publisher cannot sell them anymore, suffering a direct and quantifiable economic loss.&lt;p&gt;Here, it&apos;s more like the distributor left their books around in a library, and some people got to read them for free. The publisher can still sell them. There is no direct loss, the damage is hardly quantifiable (it might actually turn out to be a net positive in the end, given all this free publicity).&lt;p&gt;The digital world is funny like that.&lt;p&gt;EDIT: this is not to say that Amazon shouldn&apos;t be held accountable for their mistake, if there is a breach of contract involved; just that it doesn&apos;t matter whether there were 6000 downloads or 60.</text></item><item><author>wccrawford</author><text>Amazon should own up and pay.  They have effectively stolen from this author.  No, we can&apos;t guarantee that those people would have bought it for free, but if these were physical books, the law would require that they pay the author.&lt;p&gt;The agreement wasn&apos;t that they get to change the price any time they like.  The agreement was that they get to match competitors.  They violated that.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>pbhjpbhj</author><text>&amp;#62;&lt;i&gt;The publisher can still sell them. There is no direct loss, the damage is hardly quantifiable (it might actually turn out to be a net positive in the end, given all this free publicity).&lt;/i&gt; //&lt;p&gt;Legally you&apos;re wrong.&lt;p&gt;This is the reason why you can&apos;t call giving away someone else&apos;s copyright work on purpose &quot;non-commercial&quot;. If you enter the market with the same product for free you interfere with the commercial operation of the rightful owner who is selling for a higher price. You can&apos;t generally sell a book to a person who has already been given that book for free. Moreover the effort in promoting the book has been lost without reward.&lt;p&gt;Now granted it might work out that giving away the product for free acts to increase overall sales. But it&apos;s not Amazon&apos;s place to make that call (the Bit-torrent/bootlegger defence I suppose you&apos;d call this). Amazon infringed on the copyright of the author.&lt;p&gt;IMO the legal system should come down hard on a company that is trying to leverage copyright for their own gains whilst simultaneously denying the creator of copyright works the reward of their labours.&lt;p&gt;Consider a converse situation, that I take a product from a distributor (Disney say), duplicate it and give it away for free. How many millions of pounds do you think I&apos;d be on the hook for?&lt;p&gt;Incidentally I&apos;m not saying that is right, I&apos;m saying that&apos;s how copyright law plays out.</text></comment>