When Barnes & Noble eventually brings its e-reader to market, it may not be able to avoid Amazon's Kindle fiasco of last month, according to a lawyer.
Last month, Amazon remotely deleted two e-books from customers' wireless devices after they were found to be copyrighted, sparking off a public outcry.
Mark Lim, head of intellectual property, media and entertainment at Singapore-based law firm Tan Peng Chin, told ZDNet Asia that competing bookseller, Barnes & Noble, may not be able to avoid performing a similar operation should it encounter a copyright dispute.
If a publisher takes Barnes & Noble to court over such an issue, it will have to comply, he said.
Barnes & Noble plans to come out with a similar e-book reader to Amazon's Kindle device next year. Like Amazon's Kindle, the Barnes & Noble reader will be able to pull books wirelessly to the device.
While Amazon's CEO, Jeff Bezos, has promised not to delete books off devices again, two U.S.-based lawyers have said it may not be up to Amazon if the incident repeated itself.
Eric Goldman, Santa Clara University law professor was quoted in The Registerlast month saying electronic material on devices may be regarded as both belonging to the user and the distributor--as opposed to a physical item already in the user's possession--and is up to a judge's ruling to decide if a copyright dispute extends to what is already on devices.
The safe harbor clause of the U.S. Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA) typically protects distributors if they remove copyrighted content from their Web sites. Distributors are protected against content already downloaded.
But a judge may take into consideration e-book readers' wireless abilities, and extend the ruling to books already downloaded, Goldman said.
"It really comes down to a commercial decision," he said, adding that companies can likely negotiate to pull content off or compensate content owners for each copy that has gone out.
"Amazon probably chose to remotely delete the books so it could enjoy the safe harbor provision," he said.
In Singapore, where the safe harbor clause doesn't apply, things may go down a more traditional path. Should a claimant raise a dispute, a publisher may not pull content off, but likely reach a settlement involving compensation for copies that have gone out, and an agreement not to sell the material any further, said Lim.
Barnes & Noble did not respond by press time.
Play video
Barnes & Noble may face Kindle-type dilemma
let's hope barnes & noble doesn't name their reader something silly. i found an interesting post about e-readers over at onthebutton. worth a look: onthebutton.wordpress.com...
Posted by anonymous on Friday, August 14 2009 02:40 AM