jamesrt:

It's all mad, and only because of Lawyers.

It's no wonder that people pirate stuff - often a legal channel just doesn't exist for many silly reasons.

”Here's my money - take it!”.
"Sorry, our Lawyer says 'No'.”

As many know, I am a lawyer and of course I am sick of these dumb and uninformed potshots at lawyers. No, it's not the lawyers' fault no matter how much you want to think it is or how many times you decide to randomly capitalise the "L" in lawyer when it's not in context a proper noun.

When someone sells you an e-book, they are giving you a license to use it on certain terms. As a matter of law, you can only sell a licence to someone to do X when you have the right to do so. To relate this to a more understandable "real world" example, I can't sell you a car that I don't own. The IP owner of the book (most likely the publisher) has freely chosen to sign an agreement with a seller (in your case Amazon) that book licence can only be sold in a particular fashion and/or with certain geographical restrictions. They most likely did this because they perceive this to be to their advantage profit-wise.

Lawyers act on client instructions -- they might propose certain agreement structures but at the end of the day, nothing happens to someone/some entity's property without an authorised officer's/director/senior management's concurrence. You don't like how these things work? Take it up with the publisher and save the ignorant potshots.

Edit: fixed some typos