Amazon goes Orwellian

Your analysis is a bit off

When comparing to a paper book that the cat does whatever on, one assumes that because it is on paper the publisher had rights to publish the book in the first place. Once you bought it, you aquired the rights throgh the publisher.

Had the publisher not owned the rights to publish and published anyway, the copyright owners have the right to demand that the publisher try to recover all books possible or pay the cash value to the copyright owners.

Now, for a single book it's just not worth the price of recovery. You may still posess the book, but you never legally bought the rights to that book, so it is stolen at that point and should either be returned or destroyed.

The amazon case is similar. Only in the Amazon case it was incredibly easy to gather up all the published copies because they are electronic. Amazon was obligated to retrieve all the stolen merchendise to make the copyright owner whole. or to pay the owner for the books. In this case, the owner demanded all Kindle copies be retrieved.

In most copyright infringement cases, if the offending publisher did it on paper, they get the bill to make the copyright owner whole. In the case of Amazon, they chose not to pay the bill but to retrieve the stolen material from those in posession.

Everyone returned to the neutral point they were at before amazon stole the books.

Sad when jornalists get it wrong repeatedly. ComputerWorld seems loaded with journalists that don't research the legal facts and spout bad information over and over again.

It's not about why they did it

N00bs et al miss the bigger point.

Sure, the publisher shouldn't have been pushing the book. Yup, Amazon was obligated to stop selling the book once it was aware of the screw up. Hat's off to Amazon for being a good corporate citizen and responding as quickly as it did.

But Amazon went a step further when it became the enforcer of the copyright by actually removing the book from the libraries of customers who bought the book in good conscious - without the device owner's consent.

What that action says is that digital books are not the same breed as paper books. It says that digital books are more like software - you buy a "license to read" from Amazon, but Amazon retains all other rights, including the right to enter your device and remove all vistages of the book if it so deems it necessary. The "book" belongs to Amazon, and the device is built in such a way that Amazon can on its own decide when to enforce its right of ownership, without any input or co-operation from its customers.

But books, digital or otherwise, are not software. Can you imagine Barnes and Noble or Borders entering your home library (unannounced and uninvited) to remove books that they - for whatever reason, legitimate or otherwise - deem you are no longer entitled to?

And if Amazon can do it unilaterally, what's to stop a government agency from ordering Amazon to do it when some overzealous group manages to get another book banned. Can't happen? Guess again. The Comstock laws, used to censor the likes of "The Arabian Nights", "Canterbury Tales", and Lysistrata" and birth control information by banning them from the US mail, are still on the books, and in fact were extended by the Telecommunication Reform Bill of 1996 to apply to computer networks.

I am NOT saying that Amazon participated in censorship. It did not. What I am saying is that Amazon's technology clearly makes censorship an even wider tool than it was in the past - the censors can now not only change information before it goes out or stop it from going out in the first place, they can now retroactively remove information that somehow got passed them. They can use Amazon's technology to go into your library and remove or - even more subtle and more devious - change the information they don't like.

That's disturbing.

I've lusted after Amazon's Kindle and Sony's Reader, but after this story, I'll stick to paper and ink.

Amazon goes Orwellian

I like the idea of e-books and MP3 files, but I only buy these where I have an 'unlocked' file that I can backup on different drives and use where I want. I will never buy a Kindle or any other device that allows files to be controlled by any outside party. I refuse to buy a 'license' for an e-book that can be revoked at anytime - printed books are fine, whether I buy them or check them out at my local library.

Tempest in a Teapot

Once again the Innertubes crowd makes a mountain out of a molehill. As another poster noted, the "publisher" had illegally given Amazon the "right" to push the books to Kindle devices. Unfortunately for Amazon, the publisher of said books never had the rights to allow Amazon to push them in the first place. When the actual copyright holders contacted Amazon, they did the only, and right, thing they could, which was to remove the ebooks from distribution.

We now return you to your regularly scheduled tin-foil hat programming. Look! I think I see another conspiracy brewing behind that tree over there!!

N00bs Surround Me

Not only will I not be

Not only will I not be buying a Kindle now, but Amazon has just joined my own personal blacklist. I won't be buying anything from them.

Amazon complied because those were unlicensed versions

The titles never should have been offered in the first place. Would IDG be alright with other people stealing their content to publish it for profit on Amazon Kindle? Right, didn't think so.

Indeed, this is AmazonFAIL 2.

It would have been a debacle anyway... but with Orwell's 1984? Like they say, you can't make this stuff up!

The only way they could have made this worse would have been to yank Fahrenheit 451 instead of Animal Farm!

Why I will buy a Sony

There is simply no defense that Amazon can offer up to justify what they did. I would not have believed this story to be true, but found the story on too many reputable sites not to be true.

I was deciding between a Kindle and a Sony e-book reader. After what Amazon did I am buying a Sony.