Amazon deleting Orwell books from people’s Kindles? Isn’t that a lyric in an Alanis Morissette song?
Several posts from Educated Guesswork
Of course, this is just a generalization of what digital rights management software has always done: outsourced control of some of the functions of your computer to whoever (allegedly) has copyright over the contents you’re displaying. With a typical DRM scheme this just extends to stopping you from making copies, maybe exporting to untrusted devices, etc., but you still generally have control of your own computer, and the terms don’t suddenly change in unexpected ways after you’ve bought the thing. In principle, of course, Microsoft or Apple or whatever could force new updates on you, but in practice they always seem to ask you whether you want to install an update. But in the case of a Kindle, Amazon controls it more or less completely. As you’ve just seen, we don’t have any real idea of what Amazon can do at the moment and as I said they can change the terms at any time.
Here, they link to Peter N. Glaskowsky at CNET. Glaskowsky:
From stories posted on other sites, and from my own research on Amazon.com, it’s clear the books in question had been published illegally–and not by the publisher with U.S. rights for these books, which are still under copyright protection in this country.
The listing for the illegal copy of “1984” is still present on Amazon, though it can no longer be purchased. The page for “Animal Farm” from the same publisher still appears in Google’s listings, but is no longer available on Amazon–though another pirated copy is still listed but not purchasable. (I’m not sure these are exactly the same copies at issue in this case, but at least that copy of “1984″ was yanked in the same way, according to an Amazon customer discussion.)
Note the caveat placed on the 1984 page by the publisher:
“This work is in the public domain in Canada, Australia, and other countries. It may still be copyrighted in some countries. The user should determine whether the work is in the public domain in their own country before using it.”
But of course, verifying the copyright status of a book isn’t just the user’s responsibility. It’s the publisher’s, too, and Amazon’s.
When Amazon discovered these unauthorized sales, it did the right thing: it reversed them.
The police would do the same thing if they discovered a stolen car in your driveway: just take it away. You never owned it.
Educated Guesswork:
First, this argument elides the difference between actual theft and copyright infringement. You’d hardly think this would need to be pointed out, but if I steal your car, that pretty much precludes your driving it. If I violate copyright on a book you wrote, at most I’ve deprived you of whatever revenue you would have made had I bought it instead. That’s a pretty significant difference.
Even if we ignore that, this is a pretty tendentious analogy: Amazon is not the police. Say that the original vendor had stolen a box of copies of 1984 and was selling them on Amazon marketplace. If I bought one and then Amazon later determined that they were stolen, it’s not like they would be allowed to break into my house and repossess it, even if they gave me my money back. The original owner might be able to call the police and arrange for return of the property, but that’s a pretty different story.
The counterargument, per Instapundit’s wife, is that Amazon’s actually protecting property rights by yanking stuff that violates copyright out of people’s hands. Technically true, but commercial law has traditionally let purchasers of stolen goods keep them so long as they made the purchase in “good faith.” Click here and scroll down for a legal explanation of the term or see, e.g., sections 1-201(9) and 2-403 of the Uniform Commercial Code. If the holder of the Orwell copyright wants justice, by all means let him sue Amazon and the unlicensed publisher of the digital books for damages. That’s the surest way to get Bezos and company to more closely police the copyright status of books being sold in their Kindle store. Why they’re not already doing that is frankly unfathomable to me, but doubly unfathomable is them reaching into your virtual bookshelf to forcibly repurchase a book you’ve already bought. Exit question: Is this a dealbreaker for would-be Kindle purchasers?
Derek Thompson at The Atlantic:
First, Amazon promises that you keep what you buy on their devices, permanently. Second, it deletes two George Orwell books. Third, it promises it will “not remove books from customers’ devices in these circumstances” ever again. That sequence should not instill confidence in Kindle readers that their downloads are guaranteed to be permanent.
Of course, we should expect more media piracy in books, just as illegal downloads have impacted movies and music downloads. As Jack Shafer wrote in Slate, there’s no reason why the book industry won’t face it’s own Napster conundrum — that is, the launching of an illegal e-book channel that customers use in lieu of Amazon’s platform.
Richard Waters at the Financial Times:
The idea that you can “own” digital data, in the same sense that you can own a book, was always suspect. But at least some forms of digital media have conveyed many of the attributes of ownership. With local storage, the bits have been delivered onto a device that you can unplug and put in your pocket. The information, at that point, is “yours”.
Unless the device in question is a Kindle. Once connected to Sprint’s Whispernet (now that’s a name George Orwell would have appreciated) Amazon can (and did) reach in and delete it.
Laura Northrup at The Consumerist
At Tech Crunch, MG Siegler and Devin Coldewey
UPDATE: Farhad Manjoo in Slate
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July 21, 2009 at 8:41 pm
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