Amazon Kindle: books you can never share

Ah yes, progress.  Now for only $10 you can buy a book and read it.

ONLY you can read it and ONLY on Amazon's $400 Kindle e-book reader.

Want to give it to a friend?  Sell it?  Pass it on to your children?  Donate it to a library?  Sorry, too bad, it's "licensed digital content", don't you know.

Use of Digital Content. Upon your payment of the applicable fees set by Amazon, Amazon grants you the non-exclusive right to keep a permanent copy of the applicable Digital Content and to view, use, and display such Digital Content an unlimited number of times, solely on the Device or as authorized by Amazon as part of the Service and solely for your personal, non-commercial use. Digital Content will be deemed licensed to you by Amazon under this Agreement unless otherwise expressly provided by Amazon.

Restrictions. You may not sell, rent, lease, distribute, broadcast, sublicense or otherwise assign any rights to the Digital Content or any portion of it to any third party, and you may not remove any proprietary notices or labels on the Digital Content. In addition, you may not, and you will not encourage, assist or authorize any other person to, bypass, modify, defeat or circumvent security features that protect the Digital Content.

(Some emphasis above mine.)  I find it interesting that in all the Engadget hoopla, and on the entire snazzy Kindle page, this is never mentioned.  You have to go to Kindle Support, and find the last item on the page (Amazon Kindle Terms of Use and Policies), and then you get another list of pages where you have to select "License Agreement and Terms of Use", and then find the Digital Content section within that item.

How many people do you think are going to do that?

I also like this language "you may not, and you will not".  Um, ok I can see how you can forbid it, but "you will not"?  What is this, like a contractual limitation on reality?

Comments

[cameron]

It is sad that the publishing industry is so scared.

I don't blame them, i am not sure if they have ever been profitable (with the exception of harry potter)

The question is how big a issue is this to users? You can't really sell your iTunes library also, yet consumers appear to be pretty okay with that.

Also I wonder if individual authors/publishers can put a different license on there content. Could Cory Doctorow keep a creative commons license and sell things through the amazon store?