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It’s Their Content, You’re Just Licensing it

The New York Times: “Amid recent debates over several publishers’ removal of potentially offensive material from the work of popular 20th-century authors — including Roald Dahl, R.L. Stine and Agatha Christie — is a less discussed but no less thorny question about the method of the revisions. For some e-book owners, the changes appeared as if made by a book thief in the night: quietly and with no clear evidence of a disturbance. In Britain, Clarissa Aykroyd, a Kindle reader of Dahl’s “Matilda,” watched a reference to Joseph Conrad disappear. (U.S. editions of Dahl’s books were unaffected.) Owners of Stine’s “Goosebumps” books lost mentions of schoolgirls’ “crushes” on a headmaster and a description of an overweight character with “at least six chins.” Racial and ethnic slurs were snipped out of Christie’s mysteries.In each case, e-books that had been published and sold in one form were retroactively (and irrevocably) altered, highlighting what consumer rights experts say is a convention of digital publishing that customers may never notice or realize they signed up for. Buying an e-book doesn’t necessarily mean it’s yours. “Nobody reads the terms of service, but these companies reserve the right to go in there and change things around,” said Jason Schultz, the director of New York University’s Technology Law and Policy Clinic and a co-author of “The End of Ownership.” “They make it feel similar to buying a physical book, but in reality it’s 180 degrees different,” he added. Automatic e-book updates are a common feature of many popular e-book platforms, including Amazon’s Kindle and Google Play. A typical update might change a book’s cover art to match a new film or television adaptation, or add material in response to new developments in a story. But publishers can issue updates for any reason and generally don’t identify or explain revisions. The edits to Stine’s and Christie’s novels came to wide attention only when they were reported this month by The Times of London and The Telegraph, years after having been pushed out to readers…”

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