Good lord, a link to slashdot, which links to theguardian, which links to boingboing... Doesn't anyone believe in primary sources anymore? I miss the good old days when a 20 line "story" would be spread across 20 pages not 20 sites.

I looked at the movie on Amazon and its still up for sale, although the "Most Helpful customer reviews" is less than glowing with christmas cheer. Its glowing like a heavily used nuclear test site.

This is weird and disturbing... so I can buy and pay for something today that was removed from sale yesterday, or just what is going on here?

This has never happened to me with books / stuff in general at Amazon but the half life of subscribe and save groceries must be about 6 months because seemingly every month something else gets discontinued. I can't complain too much, often its about half the price of the local grocery stores, but its still annoying. More like "subscribe for a couple months and save" at best.

The boingboing article has already been posted on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6911944

I missed that one.

The top comment on that HN discussion, by RexRollman, is right on target: companies shouldn't be allowed to use the word "buy" for this kind of thing

Well according to the source article Amazon blamed the removal on "a temporary issue with some of our catalog data" which it says has been fixed, adding that "customers should never lose access to their Amazon Instant Video purchases." It says the database error was unrelated to Disney's request.

Think we should wait a bit before we jump to conclusions here. May all have been a software bug.

The exact same problem happened a month ago with iTunes purchases and also Disney. Coincidence? I think they just were caught red-handed, twice.

Amazon's policy allows them to withdraw purchased items [1]. It could be a bug, it could be policy, it could be a bug that exposed an existing policy. There PR has been, unsuprisingly, silent on this front. This is why I have no faith in digital ditribution; the music industry finally got it, the movie and game industry still don't get it.

[1] Availability of Purchased Digital Content. Purchased Digital Content will generally continue to be available to you for download or streaming from the Service, as applicable, but may become unavailable due to potential content provider licensing restrictions and for other reasons, and Amazon will not be liable to you if Purchased Digital Content becomes unavailable for further download or streaming. You may download and store your own copy of Purchased Digital Content on a Compatible Device authorized for such download so that you can view that Purchased Digital Content if it becomes unavailable for further download or streaming from the Service.

I agree. Pulling the purchased content makes no sense for Disney. If the general public is routinely exposed to the fact that digital purchases aren't "real", publishers will not be able to charge as much for them, since the value customers perceive will be lower (and that caps what the publishers can charge). Disney might pull future purchases from Amazon (which is apparently what they meant to do), but they'd be idiots to pull existing purchases from Amazon. Which doesn't completely disprove they wouldn't do it, but the self-interested thing to do is still to leave them on there for customers who already bought them.

DRM clawback. It's all fun and games until your new car won't start some morning because someone typed in the wrong account number and deactivated your software.

We need consumer protection laws but that would require politicians to care about people and not corporations, so never going to happen.

Forget consumer protection laws, just don't use DRM. This kind of anti-consumer behavior cannot happen without DRM in your content and on your devices.

The fact this can happen is the problem. Technology enabling such widespread censorship must not be so eagerly adopted.

If you have ever worked on or run an ecommerce site with digital goods, you might understand more easily how this could happen by accident.

That's the point.

There's no way that Sony can accidentally whoops-obliterate my old PS1 games retroactively. My Steam library, by comparison, could be gone tomorrow with one minor accident at Valve.

The fact that it can happen, at all, ever, means something is very, very wrong.

That "something very very wrong" is the only way digital streaming purchases can ever be. If you're streaming content from someone else's servers, you're always just one mistake away from having everything disappear. There are ways around that which aren't as convenient as streaming, so if you're worried about it, use the alternatives. There's literally no way to have content streaming from Amazon and not be at their mercy to not fuck up. The only thing you can hope for is that the fix is quick and everything is restored in the end.

For many people, though, it's a tradeoff they're willing to make. Netflix, for example, is just too damn cheap and convenient for me to get upset about the restrictions (except why I can't play it on Linux when I can play it on Android and Roku...)

> The fact this can happen is the problem.

So ... you object to being able to stream movies from someone else's servers? Because this exact sort of issue will happen whenever a movie you want to watch resides anywhere but under your direct control.

Also, calling this "censorship" is some pretty wild hyperbole.

Good thing this is illegal in Germany, and Amazon would have to reimburse their customers (those who are so bold to ask for reimbursement, of course.. :D). On the other hand, the difficult legislation that prohibits such agreements is probably part of the reason why many such services are still not available in Germany..

Disney should be forced to reimburse customers. If they permitted a retailer to sell and item, collected their part of the sale, then invalidating the sale at a later date should be illegal or done with a penalty.

As it stands now, no item you buy from any source is safe.

Disney didn't pull the product from existing customers. That was caused by an Amazon issue which has already been fixed.

The original article is more clear. They removed the show retroactively by mistake.

http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/dec/16/amazon-dis...

> They removed the show retroactively by mistake.

That's only slightly less frightening. A simple error can potentially wipe out all of my "purchases."

Just imagine that telephone conversation with customer support: "Yes, I have rebooted my machine. I need tier two suppo-- No, I don't need to update my software. Can I talk to-- No, it's not a connection problem. My ISP won't be able to help me."