And read my post again: Orwell is *not* protected by copyright in Australia, Canada, and many other places where he is out of copyright. I can get his books and read his ideas by downloading from there, for nothing. How is that ripping anyone off – and what are you going to do about it?

And if I want free books, I go to Project Gutenberg.

This debate is *not* about authors. It is about publishers. Authors today have ample means to be paid for their work, not least direct publishing via Kindle or just off their own websites. And the same platform that allows them to be paid directly and set their own prices for their work also allows them to handle their own marketing and distribution, if they prefer.

The publishing industry’s easy elision of its own interests with those of authors is a sleight of hand that obscures the whole copyright/intellectual property debate. The agency model debate is not about individual authors. Authors are not being pursued by the DoJ: publishers are. A government-backed antitrust action is a very different story from piracy that robs authors of the proceeds of their work.

It’s a mistake to equate a message of freedom of information with royalty free information. I think Orwell would be incredibly pleased to be paid top dollar for his ideas. ‘Big Media’ does not equal Big Brother, and forcing the comparison in Orwell’s name is a discredit to other things Orwell stood for, like clarity of meaning and good argument.

Next, at the risk of pointing out the obvious, even though I think what Amazon did was stupid, there’s no way to spin its remote erasure as censorship. Those ebooks were stolen goods, and it’s certainly not wrong to require someone who has inadvertently received stolen goods to return what was taken, particularly since Amazon gave the purchasers refunds they could use to buy a legitimate copy.

Nor would I worry about Penguin’s prices. Amazon is selling a Signet edition of 1984 for a reasonable $7.66 and the book is so commonly read in college classes, you can pick one up used for a dollar or two.

It’s been a while since I read an Orwell biography, but I do recall that, when it came to getting paid for his work, he was a typical writer. He’d rather be honored by getting royalties than starve without them. And I can think of no better way to censor writings on unwanted topics than by denying authors (and their heirs) compensation for their labors.

Even more important, writing without getting paid is like any other form of labor without payment. It’s a form of slavery, prohibited almost everywhere.

Finally, while it’s technically not censorship, it is a form of government repression to deny to an author the right to sell his labors under whatever contract he chooses, including the agency model. An author (and his chosen heirs) has as much right to determine at what price his book sells as a worker has to decide what wage he works for.