swa66 - 8:43 pm on Jul 18, 2009 (gmt 0)

To play devil's advocate, how could they handle it, if they'd distributed pirated content that they're liable for selling?

They should have handled it exactly how they would have handled it is it was a paper copy they had sold. Settle with the publisher (iow: pay). Taking it back by force from your customers is never an option (apparently it is for Amazon, but it should not be tolerated).

The customer bought and paid for a copy from a reputable source. For all they need to care, they have a valid license to use the content. If that distributor messed up their deal with the publisher: they should bear the consequences of their errors, not be able to offload their error onto the consumers.