[Web4lib] RE: Amazon Deletes Orwell from Kindles

[Tim Spalding]

Yes, the point isn't that they were legal—they were only legal in some
countries, not in others—the point is that buying a book that contains
a copyright violation does not, in the real world, entitle the
bookseller to enter your house and repossess the book, let alone take
and destroy the notes you took about the book.

So, with respect, the problem isn't fact checking. The problem is the facts.

The danger is that capabilities like this end up eroding our
expectations of book privacy. That expectation is a cultural thing,
built up over centuries and central to, well, western culture. It
doesn't extend past books as easily: Apple has used, a similar "kill
switch" on a number of apps it didn't like; but people don't have
quite the same expectations for an iPhone app., so the fuss was more
muted. If we let that sort of attitude take hold here, we may well
wake up in a world where where our books change and even vanish
without a trace, for any number of reasons.

The ability to delete something at any time, and to go after the
reader, rather than the author and publisher, are new. Consider the US
justice system's strong bias against preliminary injunctions on
documents that end up being clear violations of one law or another.
Publishers and authors are responsible, but nobody destroys books
until the case is decided, and nobody goes out and collects all the
violating copies from innocent readers either. So, for example, when
Daniel Elsberg was indicted for leaking the Pentagon Papers, nobody
worried all the copies out there would suddenly vanish.

Tim

On Tue, Jul 21, 2009 at 1:18 PM, Amy Rogers<rogers.a at comcast.net> wrote:
> For what it is worth, I came across this item the other day. Seemed that if
> some fact checking were done, there would not have been an outrage.
>
> "The two books in question were published for the Kindle by a company called
> Mobile Reference, which offers public domain books for around $1. Mobile
> Reference did not have the right to sell Orwell's novels because 1984 and
> Animal Farm are still under copyright protection in the United States. They
> were not legitimate or "perfectly legal" copies of the books, but rather
> illicit copies that should not have been sold in the first place.
> "Contrary to what the New York Times reported, the publisher did not change
> its mind, nor did Amazon cave to pressure. Rather, Amazon was notified that
> copyrighted material was being sold on the Amazon store without permission
> and it removed said material."
>
> More at http://bit.ly/hQDZQ
>
> "Media goes crazy over Amazon deleting '1984' from Kindle, but 99-cent ebook
> was illegal copy"
>
>
>
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