Amazon coughs $150k to student over lost notes
Found on The Register on Thursday, 01 October 2009
A student who sued Amazon for deleting George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four from his Kindle ebook, rendering his notes useless, has won $150,000 along with protection for other Kindle users.
Fewer than 2000 copies of Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm had been sold, so Amazon reversed history by deleting the work over the Kindle's whispernet and crediting the accounts of those who had bought a copy.
That was, according to Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, "stupid, thoughtless and painfully out of line with our principles", not to mention being very bad publicity indeed.
This could have been handled much better; simply deleting bought content without any notice (even with a refund) isn't a great way to keep customers happy.