Posted on 07/21/2009 11:54:55 AM PDT by nickcarraway
In George Orwell’s “1984,” government censors erase all traces of news articles embarrassing to Big Brother by sending them down an incineration chute called the “memory hole.”
On Friday, it was “1984” and another Orwell book, “Animal Farm,” that were dropped down the memory hole — by Amazon.com.
In a move that angered customers and generated waves of online pique, Amazon remotely deleted some digital editions of the books from the Kindle devices of readers who had bought them.
An Amazon spokesman, Drew Herdener, said in an e-mail message that the books were added to the Kindle store by a company that did not have rights to them, using a self-service function. “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,” he said.
Amazon effectively acknowledged that the deletions were a bad idea. “We are changing our systems so that in the future we will not remove books from customers’ devices in these circumstances,” Mr. Herdener said.
Customers whose books were deleted indicated that MobileReference, a digital publisher, had sold them. An e-mail message to SoundTells, the company that owns MobileReference, was not immediately returned.
Digital books bought for the Kindle are sent to it over a wireless network. Amazon can also use that network to synchronize electronic books between devices — and apparently to make them vanish.
An authorized digital edition of “1984” from its American publisher, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, was still available on the Kindle store Friday night, but there was no such version of “Animal Farm.”
People who bought the rescinded editions of the books reacted with indignation, while acknowledging the literary ironies involved. “Of all the books to recall,” said Charles Slater, an executive with a sheet-music retailer in Philadelphia,
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
I would never trust a Big Brother device or service like the Kendall, iPod, or iTunes. I’ll read books and listen to music I download myself on p2p networks on my netbook.
precisely why we cannot allow ink and paper to vanish
I’m not so much bothered by the length, but it’s hardly arbritrary.
Didn’t Disney lobby Congress heavily over the “Winnie the Pooh” copyrights, which were to revert to A.A. Milne’s descendents in the 1990s?
That intellectual property is worth BILLIONS.
If the seller provided me a hardcopy of the books I bought I would buy a Kindle today. However, as long as it is totally digital with no hardcopy, I will never buy one. I want to be able to resell my property, and I have yet to see a legal way to do that with a Kindle.
Now here's something about the Kindle that I really don't like. Amazon can access your device w/o your permission!
Hmmmm. Can having a TOS document that people sign off on supersede the law? My understanding is that it can’t.
There is nothing in the terms that gives them the right to delete the books though, that’s the thing.
If it was in there, we could just say it’s not good business practice...but Amazon violated their own terms of service.
Does this bug anyone besides me?
First it was, "Our requests to interview Mr. "X" were denied."
Then it was, "Our phone calls were not returned."
Now it's "No one answered the e-mail."
What's next? "Our tweets were ignored?"
Talk about blaming someone else because you're a bad reporter.
Copyright terms vary by country. That’s what tripped up the vendor of public domain works. Orwell’s books are out of copyright in Canada but not in the US.
Thanks to the Mighty Mickey, nothing will ever again pass out of copyright in the US.
Kendall uses .pdf right?
I’d back up anything on it, especially now that you know they can remotely access your files, read them, and delete them.
Hell, I’d burn the thing.
It’s considered a legal contract, as long as it doesn’t break the law.
Nothing they (Amazon) did appears to break the law (specifically, COPYRIGHT LAW, which is notoriously protective of the copyright holder).
In any Kindle dictionary, the word ‘gullible’ is missing!
I haven’t read the TOS, but if they had a clause saying that they have the responsibility/right to respect and enforce copyright law, then deleting it from the Kindle would be legal, specific performance.
Heck, they might not even need that clause, since they are bound to obey copyright law anyway?
bookmark
Technically I suppose it's in the same category as stolen merchandise. A thief can't legally sell it, and even somebody that pays money for it doesn't technically "own" it. It still belongs to the rightful owner.
Now, if they were physical books it's just wildly impractical to go out and recover every copy, and I don't suppose any such thing would ever happen. They could "ask" for them back but that's about all. But in this case, it's just an entry in a database that goes "poof". They do it because they can.
I don't have any real heartburn over this. They made a mistake and they're owning up and fixing it. Not a big deal to me.
I guess laws in my state laws are different. Theft is illegals, as is trespassing on private property.
Unfortunately, the presentation of public-domain material can itself be copyrighted. The company that pulled Kindle’s plug on Animal Farm likely has copyrighted the formatting and other aspects of a particular presentation; Amazon cannot just “photocopy” their publication of the public-domain work and sell that without license or compensation.
Sure it does. If my new idea involves using an identifiable part of your work in a new way (i.e. sampling the bass line of your hit song) then I'm in trouble.
Kindle files can be backed up locally too... No sweat. It mounts like an external USB device on your computer.
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