You really don't think the article getting published has anything to do with Amazon's about-face? I'm surprised. I usually assume that these kinds of stories do cause companies to change their behaviour in specific cases.
Why do you think otherwise?
Note: I love Amazon and agreed with your defending of them in the original post. I'm honestly surprised that it isn't obvious that the article influenced Amazon here.
When's the last time a submission to HN got more than 1000 upvotes? When Steve Jobs died? I think the article's popularity (not just on HN, but HN's upvotes are a decent measure of how much an article will be re-shared) is most definitely a reason for this one person's problem being fixed.
1000 points happened around a month ago as well, but before that there doesn't seem to be any, though I'd expect Steve Job's death to be much higher - perhaps it was hidden after a time?
Yeah, and it's not like anyone who works for Amazon reads HN! Oh, wait...
Most likely, a few engineers from Amazon saw the story and forwarded it to the right person. That sort of thing is fairly common even in large companies; I ask friends who work at Facebook for favors all the time, for example.
We needed "Student Research and Development" changed to "StudentRND" on a page, but it had a few thousand likes, so it wouldn't allow it. The official method of solving this was spend $10k on ads and then ask the Ad team to do it :p
Best part was we got an email later that day saying "Student Research and Development" was obscene, and would need to be changed.
One possibility is that Amazon's policy is (and has been) to leave purchased content on a Kindle even if the account is blocked. Unfortunately, content was removed from a Kindle after an account was blocked. Once Amazon became aware of the issue, they were able to fix it, restoring the content. In addition, because the issue had become public, Amazon chose to clarify their position and point out that mistakes can occur and be fixed. Importantly, the emails we saw yesterday refer only to why the account was blocked and whether it could be unblocked; neither the customer nor the service rep discussed the specific removal of DRM content on the device.
I find the alternatives much more surprising:
- Amazon did not have a policy on this issue prior to this situation.
- Amazon's policy is to remove any and all purchased content without explanation or warning, and they thought that no one would mind. Once they thought about it, they changed their policy.
- Or they thought they might as well screw as many people as they could until the issue became a big deal, at which point they would suddenly change their policy
- (or pretend that their policy was different all along).
- BTW, There are no bugs in Amazon's code, so one of the above must be true and any removal of content had to be due to their evil policies
- The customer service department at Amazon ignores mistakes that they know about and could fix until enough computer programmers and tech enthusiasts know about them, too.
- (because, of course, the readership of hn/wired/etc makes up a significant portion of Amazon's revenues. I mean, doesn't everyone talk about reddit at the bar after work?)
Instead, why couldn't there just be a simple mistake, which was fixed once someone became aware of it? We could all agree that the high visibility of the issue helped make the mistake clear (which Linn's emails did not) and high priority (which does not mean that it would otherwise have been completely ignored).
It's not even just the Hackernews publication. It may have started here, but it spread to all kinds of other news outlets like Wired. Hell, I was even pissed off enough to tweet some shame at Amazon about it, and if I did that, lord knows how many other people did too. This was big news. I would have been surprised if they HADN'T done anything about it.
Although, them reversing the wipe purely to save their publish image is equally despicable in my opinion.
Why do you think otherwise?
Note: I love Amazon and agreed with your defending of them in the original post. I'm honestly surprised that it isn't obvious that the article influenced Amazon here.