Norway’s Consumer Council warns Amazon that user terms for Kindle e-readers violate basic consumer rights. The watchdog is considering launching a formal process against Amazon, just as it did against Apple’s iTunes store.
“Forbrukerrådet” – the Consumer Council in Norway – gained international attention when it threatened to take iTunes store before a Norwegian government agency, the Market Council, for failing to make its online store compatible with other music players than iPod. The council also criticized that iTunes without any ado could change the rights to the music you already had bought. The complaints were dropped after Apple promised that its songs would be compatible with all other MP3 players.
Now the same Consumer Council is warning Amazon that its user terms for the Kindle e-reader violate basic consumer rights. In an interview with the Norwegian newspaper Aftenposten today Consumer Council representative Hans Marius Graasvold strongly criticized the user terms buyers of Kindle have to sign. He said these fundamentally violated consumer rights which in Norwegian law are considered obvious.
Here is what he considers unreasonable to consumers:
- Most important is that e-books from Amazon only can be read on their own device, Kindle. In the opinion of the Consumer Council this can be compared to how Apple locked iTunes to its own iPod devices.
- Amazon reserves itself the right to unilaterally change the user terms.
- Amazon will withdraw your books if you as a consumer violates the terms, even if you have bought and paid for the books. A similar action would be impossible to consider in the analog world.
I sat in a panel discussing e-books with Graasvold today (see a Norwegian summary of the discussion here). In his introduction he elaborated on his criticism and confirmed that the Consumer Council is considering very closely whether it should launch a formal process against Amazon, just as it did against Amazon. He also expected that the user terms would cause reactions from the European Union.
It should be interesting to see how this plays out. My own analysis is that Amazon uses the lock-in temporarily to build a strong market position. Eventually I think Amazon will be forced to open up its platform. Just imagine the reactions when hundred thousands of users loose all their purchased books just because they decide to switch to a different e-reader device.