Amazon takes a page from 1984, deletes Orwell books from Kindles

Amazon takes a page from 1984, deletes Orwell books from Kindles
By Wolfgang Gruener

Seattle (WA) – We all have our bad days, but it seems that Amazon had a week of particularly bad decisions this week. First it was a $200 replacement fee for broken Kindles and now we hear that the company may have taken George Orwell’s visions of a future world literally and remotely deleted books from Kindle ebook readers. Meet Amazon, your Big Brother.

According to media reports, Amazon, erased George Orwell’s “Animal Farm” and “1984” from Kindle ebook readers and reimbursed customers for the purchase price. The company said the move was necessary as soon as it had learned that a company that had no distribution right had added the ebook versions to its store.

“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,” Amazon spokesman Drew Herdener told the New York Times. However, Amazon now thinks 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,” Herdener said. Sounds a bit like the dropped $200 fee for replacing Kindles that broke because of a protective cover Amazon sells.

The deletions of the Orwell books are somewhat ironic, as the novel 1984 imagines a future world in which privacy has disappeared. Describing a repressive, totalitarian government, Big Brother watches the population’s every move that is impacted by propaganda, surveillance and control. Amazon’s deletions may be beyond the comfort level of how much control corporations have in our always connected lives these days.

http://www.tgdaily.com/content/view/43296/98/

Ironic yes, but still the right thing. No big brother here.

Legally, Amazon has to honor the wishes of the rights-holders, and they did not want the books listed.

If Amazon was just honoring its agreements, how are they the villain here?

very seriously.

lost a lot of work.
People bought the book without knowing there was a copyright violation.
Kindle needs to police its merchants better - not wipe out the personal notes, etc. people added.
Kindle's privacy policy also does not mention this sort of thing.
It's not just a simple intellectual property law thing, protecting Orwell's copyright. Kindle just violated the copyright of everyone who had taken personal notes.

If they sold me a book or a movie that turned out to be bootlegged they could arrange a return with my consent but they couldn't walk into my house and snatch it off my table. This is essentially the same thing- the content is already in the possession of the purchaser. Remotely erasing somebody else's content (the customer purchased it, whether or not Amazon had the right to sell it) without permission isn't acceptable.

I'd be shocked if that's allowable either under the law or their EULA.

edited for clarity

who ever is in charge of his estate it`s going to give away those rights for free.

it was`t a bad decision...they did`t have the right to distribute the book

too.
I don't know why you say it's predictable but I'm interested in why.
I wouldn't expect Microsoft to build something into its OS that allowed it to delete my personal files without me giving it permission.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=389&topic_id=5584386#5584555

Others predicted it elsewhere.

It's a classic case of "I don't think *anybody* could have predicted that!"

:rofl:

people's intellectual property & I hope there are lawsuits. If they give people a way to insert notes into the files, you'd think they would know they cannot just delete entire files.

One more reason to not buy one (the price is another).

Students lost a lot of work.

Also, kindle's privacy policy does not allow for this.
It would be like Microsoft building in spying ability into their OS and deleting your files off of your computer.