To those who reflexively defend any corporation against the individual in the name of the mythical free market (which is actually a massively regulated market favorable to large corporations that can bribe legislators):
Vox Day has been among the most hated persons in the SJW milieu since GamerGate and Sad Puppies. The Amazon technical staff is full of activist, militant SJWs. Do the math.
Assuming for the sake of argument that Castalia House has in fact somehow violated terms of service, I will assert this:
SELECTIVE enforcement of laws, regulations, and policies are being used to destroy conservatives in the public arena.
If you have no problem with SELECTIVE enforcement, then you are not a conservative; when they come for you, I will have no sympathy.
Amazon backed down after less than a day.
https://voxday.blogspot.com/2019/01/reinstated.html#comment-form
“From Amazon:
Thank you for your email concerning the status of your account.
The most recent message we sent to you regarding ASIN B06XFQ24QC was incorrect.
Based on your appeal, we are reinstating your account and you will receive any applicable royalties.”
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Comments from that thread:
I suspect that, once a more senior suit realized the implications of this f***ery, he realized that this was the sort of thing that could get the IRS, CFPB, and SEC all looking VERY closely at Amazon.
Amazon suddenly had a (very tiny, admittedly) pile of money that they couldn’t account for. Someone at the IRS would likely say “Ex nihilo, nihil fit,” and proceed on the assumption that there was MORE money out there that they couldn’t account for. LOTS more. Like, maybe enough to get him promoted from GS-15 to a supergrade.
SEC would be interested in potential Sarbanes-Oxley violations.
CFPB would LOVE to rack up fines on a major credit card issuer.
AND
What I suspect is that a corporate lawyer took a single look at the facts at hand. Especially the explicit statement that it was a copyright violation which is the ONE reason (according to their TOS) that would have allowed us to go to court instead of arbitration, and then we’d probably have been talking one or two orders of magnitude bigger sums. And as a cherry on top, the claim was trivially demonstrated as false because the email they referred to said something entirely different. But still, since it was THEIR claim, false or not, it would have been court.
I very much doubt that after that one look, fighting was on the table anymore. What they were probably trying to figure out is what to say, so that it would lead to as little liability as possible. I note that they were very explicit about having been mistaken about copyright violation. This response clearly came from someone who knew a thing or two.
A publishing house that focuses on conservative science fiction authors had one guy publish a parody of a John Scalzi book, Corroding whatever.
That book was taken down. Someone brought up that Amazon allows rip-offs of Transformers as “Transmorphers” and others, so you can’t ban the Scalzi parody. Book goes back up. Another SJW campaign flags it as intellectual property rip-offs or fraud, so it comes down again.
An Amazon employee decides you’ve got too many violations against your account as a publisher. But we aren’t just going to take down that Scalzi parody for good - we’re taking down hundreds of books by dozens of authors. ALL Amazon kindle versions of all Castalia House are taken down. And, for the icing, we’re not going to pay you January royalties for the hundreds of thousands of KDP sales.
Enough fans flooded Amazon that Castalia House’s books were restored via Amazon Kindle.
THE BIGGER PICTURE
It is part of a broader trend at Amazon to throttle conservative content, both by the company and liberal bullies.
They have stocked a number of WorldNetDaily Press and Michael Savage books, but they only have a few hundred or thousand on hand. They sell those, and then they say it is sold out. The publisher wants to send them more books, but they intentionally don’t restock for a while. And they promote the Kindle version of which they get a bigger cut.
Another issue is the reviews. They remove one star reviews en mass for Clintons’ books and other liberal authors, but they do nothing when liberal mobs give a bunch of fake one star reviews to conservative authors. They know that ratings affect sales, and they don’t care to remove this weight on conservative sales.
Next up - purging reviewers. One of the biggest conservative Christian reviewers had his account pulled for reviewing one of Joseph Farah’s books, Amazon citing vague excuses. They’ve been purging a number of conservative book reviewers, taking down their reviews and preventing them reviewing new works. I had to fight that in my case, and unlike some others, won. The fact that I reviewed nearly everything I buy turned out to be in my favor.
I can understand why Amazon wanted to take down all Castalia House books - while most works are science fiction or fantasy, it includes Moira Greyland Peat’s book “The Last Closet”, a book discussing pedophilia in the scifi community and tying homosexuality and pedophilia together as one spectrum.
Taking down Castalia Books meant taking down her book, as well. But as the daughter of two homosexuals, her father jailed for child rape, they couldn’t say her book was fake or made up.
I know there is a campaign against Moira Greyland Peat in general, because the same liberal mobs that tried to get her books banned also had her harp music flagged as explicit and did a lot of fake negative reviews on her fiction and musical tracks, as well. Using the Scalzi book parody as a way to delist and hurt her and a bunch of authors vaguely tied to her would make sense.
Summary
This is just a bigger salvo in the culture war against conservative content creators in general.