Amazon raises legal battle: Who owns digital content?

When paying money for a book, both physical and digital, most customers assume that their purchases are theirs forever. However, according to Amazon, the rights to those books belong to them, and the money paid by the customer is merely a rental fee.

According to a Norwegian technology blogger called Martin Bekkelund, his friend Linn Jordet Nygaard entered into a dispute with Amazon after her account with the online retail giant had been shutdown and all access to her Kindle book collections had been rescinded. When she attempted to contact Amazon to get back access to her books she was told by a representative that her account had been linked to another and therefore breached their copyright rules. The confusion was caused, according to Nygaard, after she bought a new Kindle and gave her old one to her mother.

Over the last decade, with media being delivered digitally rather than physically, many of the rights that consumers were accustomed to have been removed, with the remaining system considered, by retailers at least, to be more of a rental service.

A similar case emerged recently, although was later denied, when it was reported that Hollywood star Bruce Willis planned to sue Apple over a dispute as to who owned the music he had downloaded from their iTunes store. Again, content purchased digitally is tied to users’ accounts and are not supposed to be transferred.

Perhaps digital rights owners and online retailers would be better off making these issues over ownership much clearer in the future, in order to avoid further confusion and bad press.