[nmh]

Glad to see people reading about what is happening -

Animal Farm and 1984 are very relevant to what Obama and the media are doing to us NOW.

[cynwoody]

Who needs Amazon?

http://www.msxnet.org/orwell/

And while I’m at, I should give equal time to a communist author:

http://obamalover.googlepages.com/

(Can come in handy when you need to look up a quote without turning pages or paying royalties.)

[Star Traveler]

The article said — The Orwell ordeal highlighted two concerns in the virtual world — that a book already paid for and acquired can be revoked by the long arm of an e-tailer (the Kindle operates on a wireless connection that Amazon ultimately controls); and the difficulty of stopping bootlegged texts.

—

That’s one very good reason to *never have* a Kindle e-book reader. That’s like someone walking into your home and taking stuff out of it and saying that you should have never been able to buy it at the store, so we’re now taking it away from you.

And it’s certainly ironic that “changing history” and “rewriting history” was done in our present day through people’s Kindle e-book reader with George Orwell’s story of “1984”...

[Pontiac]

"When we were notified of this by the rights holder, we removed the illegal copies from our systems and from customers' devices, and refunded customers.

George Orwell died in 1950. That is 59 years ago.

Why are his books still under copy right.

Copy right was originally intended to ensure that men of Ideas would be guaranteed compensation for their works. I can understand that. Originally copy rights were extended for twenty years (typically an author would die before the copy right ran out). Now copy rights are immortal. I could even understand having copy right protection extending to the life of the author or perhaps even the life of the designated heir. But fifty years for a book is just nonsense.

Copy right protection is very likely preventing many books from being read. Books that today could be freely down loaded from a central data server and read can not be because copy right protections prevent it.

As a rabid capitalist I am all for profit but the people profiting on Orwell’s work today I will wager have no relationship at all with Orwell and likely as not even with the original publisher.

At some point knowledge and literature should enter the public domain and it should not take fifty years and it should not be indefinite.