Amazon on the Orwellian episode: We’ll stop the Big Bro Act
From Information Week—in the wake of Amazon’s deletion of 1984 and Animal Farm from customers’ Kindles:
"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," the company said in an e-mailed statement. "We are changing our systems so that in the future we will not remove books from customers’ devices in these circumstances."
Amazon says that that the books in question were added to its catalog using the company’s self-service platform by a third-party who did not have the rights to the books. And it says it will no longer delete books in this manner.
Now an EFF lawyer is wondering if the FTC will be interested. High time, damn it! We’ve been saying as much for months. DRMed books are a consumer rip-off, pure and simple—“sold” when actually they’re licensed subject to the whims of publishers, retailers and others.
Image: Poster promoting a film adaptation of 1984.
Related: New York Times, Register, Baltimore Sun, Ars Technica, Wall Street Journal, CNET and Google news roundup, plus Techmeme.
July 18th, 2009 at 10:29 am
What a waste. Amazon has now done tremendous damage to their Kindle brand with this incident which will no doubt be recounted for years whenever DRM comes up. And some details, like the legality/illegality of the original book listing, are already being distorted (see the 10th comment on the original Teleread post, for example).
They never should have done this — according to the NYT story it wasn’t even allowed by their terms of service. Idiotic.
July 18th, 2009 at 12:21 pm
The group that posted the unauthorized edition of 1984 has committed a perfect provocation. Winston Smith, the main character in the novel, worked for the Ministry of Truth rewriting history for the government. He would place documents destined for destruction in a slot leading to an incinerator. As noted in the New York Times, the slot was called the memory hole, and Amazon has now revealed that it has implemented an electronic memory hole.
This retroactive deletion capability is perilous for consumers. Imagine a dispute between an author and a publisher that requires years to resolve in the court system. Suppose that finally, a judge decides that a publisher illegally acquired the ebook rights to a work. Would Amazon retroactively delete all the extant ebook copies even after a multiyear delay?
Suppose the court system rules that a book contains libelous passages. Would an ebook owner wake up one day to find that he now has a sanitized edition with several rewritten sections? This might be an even bigger potential problem with books that are only readable online or books that are stored online in “ebook lockers”.
Amazon has apparently been chastened by the reactions of consumers to this debacle.
Phrases such as “in these circumstances” are notably imprecise. Kindle owners may also wonder if this new policy can be retroactively altered and adjusted just like an Amazon ebook.
July 20th, 2009 at 2:32 am
It’s just as well that Amazon do not sell the Kindle in the UK, because unauthorized modification of someone else’s computer is been a criminal offense under the Computer Misuse Act.