Amazon keeps selling product after customer’s son’s death AND after settlement; Big publishers sue Amazon’s Audible; Publisher does RIGHT THING after copyright infringement; and MUCH MORE! Whispers and Warnings for 08/27/19

Amazon keeps selling product after customer’s son’s death AND after settlement; Big publishers sue Amazon’s Audible; Publisher does RIGHT THING after copyright infringement; and MUCH MORE! Whispers and Warnings for 08/27/19

Amazon kept selling deadly bike helmet after customer’s son died AND after it settled a lawsuit filed by the family!
Amazon Has Ceded Control of Its Site. The Result: Thousands of Banned, Unsafe or Mislabeled Products
“Amazon has proven unable or unwilling to effectively police third-party sellers on its site.”

Amazon can’t police its own illegal product offerings yet the government wants to put it in charge of our data?!
How Amazon and Silicon Valley Seduced the Pentagon
“Tech moguls like Jeff Bezos and Eric Schmidt have gotten unprecedented access to the Pentagon. And one whistleblower who raised flags has paid the price.”

Americans are doing less reading, and more listening…
Why Podcasts Are the New Self-Help Books for Stressed Americans
“Self-help books can seem cheesy in the midst of the sophisticated wellness boom. A welcome update…”

When publishers print without thinking…
Mississippi prof, who went to Georgetown Prep with Brett Kavanaugh, sues HuffPost
“The lawsuit said HuffPost and Feinberg repeatedly defamed Evans and friend Douglas Kennedy to a nationwide audience on multiple occasions in September 2018 by falsely asserting that they helped arrange the purchase and delivery of cocaine at Georgetown Prep that resulted in the April 1984 death of David Kennedy, Douglas’ brother and the son of the late U.S. attorney general and senator, Robert F. Kennedy.”

Is YOUR audiobook on Audible? Is Amazon planning to give away the text of your book for FREE?!
Top publishers sue Audible (which is owned by Amazon) over planned captioning feature
“Audible Captions takes publishers’ proprietary audiobooks, converts the narration into unauthorized text, and distributes the entire text of these ‘new’ digital books to Audible’s customers,” the lawsuit reads.

Publisher does the right thing when accused of copyright infringement!
Book ‘stole’ Mormon historian’s work, but publisher offers a settlement to ‘make it right’
“When Parshall opened a copy of Kathryn Jenkins’ latest volume, ‘Did You Know … 501 Fascinating Facts From Church History,’ she knew right away that the borrowing had crossed a line.”

Science publisher putting its own interests ahead of public health and safety?
Emails Reveal science Publisher Found Papers On Herbicide Safety Should Be Retracted Due to Monsanto Meddling
“The journal editor refused to retract the papers, which declared no cancer concerns with the company’s herbicides, saying a retraction could impact last summer’s first-ever Roundup trial and harm the authors’ reputations, the emails show.”

Do you really want one huge company deciding what our children are reading in their textbooks?  
Boston textbook publisher’s merger faces antitrust criticism
“Cengage isn’t quite a household name. But critics are lumping in the Boston textbook publisher with the giants. And that could spell trouble for its game-changing merger with a similarly sized rival, McGraw-Hill.”

Author doesn’t think subjects of his book should be allowed to “fact check” it. I agree!
In no man’s land: anger as publisher puts book criticising army on hold.
“Six months on from its scheduled publication, The Changing of the Guard is now a ghost book. References to it can be found via Google but it has not been published, due to an extraordinary legal row that has sucked in SAS veteran Andy McNab, the Ministry of Defence, a prestigious war-studies centre and a number of anti-censorship organisations.”

State claims “sovereign immunity” (ha ha ha) after republishing thousands of articles without permission.
Wall Street Journal Publisher Tells Supreme Court of Being Victimized by California
“The company’s lawyers say the scope of the (copyright) infringement would ordinarily have resulted in penalty ‘exceeding eight figures,’ but CalPERS ‘asserted that sovereign immunity wholly exempted it from any liability to Dow Jones for the infringement in which it engaged.'”

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One Response to "Amazon keeps selling product after customer’s son’s death AND after settlement; Big publishers sue Amazon’s Audible; Publisher does RIGHT THING after copyright infringement; and MUCH MORE! Whispers and Warnings for 08/27/19"

  1. Debby  August 28, 2019 at 8:59 am

    Just wanted to say that your newsletter is phenomenal!