Jackson soon discovered that Amazon suspended his account because a Black delivery driver who’d come to his house the previous day had reported hearing racist remarks from his video doorbell. In a brief email sent to Jackson at 3 a.m., the company explained how it unilaterally placed all of his linked devices and services on hold as it commenced an internal investigation.
The accusations baffled Jackson. He and his family are Black. When he reviewed the doorbell’s footage, he saw that nobody was home at the time of the delivery. At a loss for what could have prompted the accusation of racism, he suspected the driver had misinterpreted the doorbell’s automated response: “Excuse me, can I help you?”
The answer here is that a digital first sale doctrine and protection of personal digital copyright are things that need better dictation into the already stated legal protections. We literally have a Constitutional right to the things we create. Congress has created protections for our creations via copyright. If you take a picture, you have instant copyright to it. You have a legal protection that you can cite to bring civil litigation to bear onto those who violate it. If Amazon takes your photos and locks you out, they cannot remove that copyright protection that you’re entitled to. EXCEPT, when their TOS indicates that you and Amazon enter into a quasi-joint ownership of everything that you upload.
And that is the thing. We already have laws that protect consumers on all of this shit. Congress just hasn’t indicated how those protections translate to digital goods and for the most part, they’ve left it up to the courts to dictate it, which has gone incredibly bad for consumers. Congress has the power to bring over buyer protections on goods into digital goods, they just won’t.
That’s what is so frustrating. We have protections, but just because it doesn’t explicitly say “applies to digital goods too” the corporate overlords get to royally fuck us over. That I think is the most infuriating thing. If this was an actual physical photo that was in a lock box or something that I was making regular payments for and the bank just decided to not let me get to my lockbox. I literally have the ability to drag their asses into court and have explicit protections to make that bank, at the very least, let me get my shit out of their box. But if it’s a digital photo in a digital lockbox, that answer is that I get to fucking pound sand if Amazon says so.
It makes no fucking reasonable sense why it is like this. With the context of greed, yes, perfect sense. But no reasonable person looks at the vast number of consumer protections enshrined in our law and then looks at the vast void of protections in the digital world and go “Huh, that makes sense.”
FYI copyright on your own files is independent from any right to access your file storage, copyright is nothing like property law no matter how much lawyers pretend it is.
Instead you want to invoke privacy law and the right to your own data.
And first sale doctrine would apply well to digital purchases like media and apps and especially the right to keep using your purchased electronics (with fully functional offline modes)