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People who bought the rescinded editions of the books reacted with indignation, while acknowledging the literary ironies involved.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 ...
Didja read the End User License Agreement? that prolonged fine print which few read probably had a “user agrees to allow deletion & refunding of materials found to have been improperly distributed” or some such. Think “repo man”.
Actually it does. Berkley Breathed found that out when he added “Mortimer Mouse” to his _Outland_ series. Disney had a chat with him, and Mortimer disappeared.
Ineresting. since most fonts have been around for years, and as far as iI know aren’t copyrighted, how can this be? additionaly, as I posted earlier, I had severall hundred books on my Palm and they were all in courier.
Like I said, copyright laws are notoriously biased in the favor of the holder.
Just like most other property rights, but copyright laws deals with things that can’t be physically stolen or even protected (although some try - DRMA). Once they’re out there, they could be fair game.
As such, copyright law is given precedence over a lot of other concepts.
I agree that it seems logical that your Kindle is your property, but copyright law might just give Amazon all the power they need to enforce it.
Mortimer Mouse wasn’t a “new” concept.
It was a thinly-disguised jab at Eisner and used a version/mutation of the original “Mortimer Mouse” that was Disney property.
At the time it/he came out, I thought it fell under “fair use” as social commentary, but apparently not. Maybe the use of the name became a direct infringement?
Like DuPont, R-12 et al and the Ozone hole...
Every time I see a nice car with an Obama bumpersticker I shake my head. I want to tell them that they don’t realize that they will not be one of the pigs.
I see your point, and I agree.
There should be a way provided to transfer (not copy) a title to another Kindle.
The First-Sale Doctrine should be rigorously upheld!
How did the let Tom & Jerry survive?
Kindle can read pdf (and word, and text, and ebook... among other) files, but the books that Amazon sells are in their own format.
I love the Kindle. It's gotten me back into regular reading because it's so easy to always have with me. I've gone from reading just a few books a year to over a dozen books in just the last few months. I like to read two or three at a time, like some Sowell and then some Heinlein, depending on what I feel like reading at the moment. This way I've got them all with me all the time. Any time I've got a few minutes I can pick it up and keep reading.
I also like the built-in dictionary. If you're not sure of a word you can just highlight it and get the definition.
By the way... anybody that hasn't read Sowell's "Housing Boom and Bust" book-- get it. It's gonna really enrage you. :-)
The irony is marvelous. But why, given the Constitutional justification for copyright, should there be a “rights holder” for works written in the 1940’s by a now-deceased author?
Intellectual property law has been corrupted to the point that it no longer promotes the arts and sciences, but impedes progress in the arts (the creation of derivative works) and sciences for the sake of commercial interests that never created anything artistic or scientific.
1984 and Animal Farm should be in the public domain (along with a whole lot of other literature, music, art, and for that matter cinema).
Fonts cannot be copyrighted.
Public-domain works obviously cannot be copyrighted.
However, using a particular font to present a public-domain work CAN be copyrighted.
It’s not the content, it’s the presentation.
i understand wahat you say. what I’m saying is books I have downloaded from the Palm site have been pretty generically formatted
That what I've been thinking as well. I have no laptop but I do need something to use for reading PDF files and such. It could be that the Kindle could do that. But I also like to watch video tutorials and it is tiresome sitting in front of a computer to do so. I'm pretty sure that a Kindle won't do that. Plus it's still black and white. How early 80's is that?
So I'm looking at the new 12.1" Netbooks and the 14" Laptops. I want (relatively) cheap, light and good battery life. Recommendations welcome.
I was interested in the Kindle, but three things have held me back.
First, its still a bit overpriced.
Second, while they will hold your backups for you, supposedly, I have already heard of cases where the backups disappear if they decide to discontinue that item. The fact that you’ve paid for it means nothing.
And now, swiping a book you’ve paid for right off your instrument. That clinches it for me.
I’ll buy a hard copy, or a pdf that I can own and copy myself. No longer interested in Kindle as a product.
I agree. It would be nice to be able to pass a book along to somebody else's Kindle. You can with other sorts of files on the Kindle, just not their books.
But I recognize too that this is part of the discount you get when you buy a book this way. A $25 or $30 new hardbound book is only about $10 on the Kindle. Part of what you give up for that discount is the ability to re-sell it to somebody else.
That said, you can of course sell the Kindle, contents and all. So not *all* of your transferability is lost. So, there's that. :-)
I think it's unlikely to become a common occurence. I'm certainly not going to worry about it.
The Kindle isn’t even fit for kindling.
0bama had it removed, of course. In doing so, he was quoted as saying...”that hits too close to the pen, uh, I mean to home”.
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