[Web4lib] RE: Amazon Deletes Orwell from Kindles

[Sharon Foster]

Making them all vanish would at least be noticeable. Changing a few
words here and there---then we're getting into Winston Smith
territory.

Sharon M. Foster, JD, MLS
Librarians bring order out of chaos.
http://www.vsa-software.com/mlsportfolio/






On Tue, Jul 21, 2009 at 2:24 PM, Tim Spalding<tim at librarything.com> wrote:
> 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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>
>
>
> --
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