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Amazon Pulls Purchased E-Book Copies of 1984 and Animal Farm
Oracle Goddess writes "In a story just dripping with irony, Amazon Kindle owners awoke this morning to discover that 1984 and Animal Farm had mysteriously disappeared from their e-book readers. These were books that they had bought and paid for, and thought they owned. Apparently the publisher changed its mind about offering an electronic edition, and apparently Amazon, whose business lives and dies by publisher happiness, caved. It electronically deleted all books by George Orwell from people's Kindles and credited their accounts for the price. Amazon customer service may or may not have responded to queries by stating, 'We've always been at war with Eastasia.'"
...must be the complete truth. Or else the thought police will come get you.
fuck kindle. buy real books and support real trees
The Kindle is now equipped with a memory hole.
[Insert pithy quote here]
You always lose. This is just another example.
This seems extremely shady legally. You bought and paid for something. Electronic or not, how do they have the right to take it away from you? I could MAYBE understand if it was a subscription-based service in which you had access to a collection, but for them to take this away from someone who specifically bought the book seems legally dubious at best.
How can there still be a copyright on this?
No wait - politicans of course.
But more to the point SHOULD there be a copyright on something from that long ago?
And if someone says it is public domain, how can they not only sell it but also deny people right to use it?
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
Please, oh, please, Kindle owners sue! This would make for an interesting case. If the property in question were concrete like a lawn mower that I purchased at Home Depot, HD decides they want it back so they pull it from my back yard but credit my account isn't that still theft? I'm dying to see what is made of this.
I can see Amazon no longer allowing it to be purchased for download but actively pulling content that has already been purchased and downloaded sounds criminal.
Who would buy a book from a publisher and sales person who think it's okay to sell you DRM crap and then take it away on a whim when you can get those exact same books legally, and for free?
Animal Farm: http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks01/0100011.txt
1984: http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks01/0100021.txt
A Magic the Gathering Article and Forum Aggregator
For stuff you really want to have access to permanently.
"If you want to know what happens to you when you die, go look at some dead stuff."
when you can get those exact same books legally
That's great if you're kicking it in the Outback or somewhere else sane, but here in the States 1984 it is still under copyright (I assume using the simple heuristic that it was created after Steam Boat Willie) and so probably not actually legal.
The enemies of Democracy are
Big Amazon.
for those of you old enough to have seen the schlock sci-fi "rollerball" it's central theme was that big brotherism actually is more likely to be durable under corporate control rather than government control. A kind of facism where the role of the state is secondary.
I think it was big oil in rollerball. but it could have been big amazon.
plus the idea of a big Amazon woman is somewhat scarier than a big brother.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
I was quite surprised when an automatic update for a copy of the Stand (Stephen King) was pushed onto me, without my consent and without notification as to what had changed. Backup copies aren't hard to make. But who owns the copy? Does Amazon own my Kindle? Do I not have a right to refuse an update?
For "$DEITY" sake, don't use, buy or recommend to anyone the Kindle!
It was designed from day one to be enable Amazon to fuck you and this is exactly what happened. I'm not surprised.
An alternative ereader with better hardware, open architecture and NOT defective by design is the iLiad by iRex. Yes, it runs Linux and you can install third-part programs. And, yes, it costs a little more, but if you value your freedom (and your books) it's more than worth it.
Disclaimer: I don't work for iRex, I'm only an happy customer.
There's a hidden treasure in Python 3.x: __prepare__()
Back on the Xanadu project we called the single-server model for content the "Library of Alexandria" problem: A disaster wiping out the server (and its backups), like the burning of the Library of Alexandria when, for many works, it contained the only (or or one of very few) copies, permanently removes the documents served by that repository from the literature. (The solution is the "multiple record" - mass printing of dead-tree books prior to automation, broad distribution of the immutable content and versioning information in the case of an "electronic literature".)
Of course centralized and mutable serving of content also enables, and greatly simplifies, the "rewriting of history" described by Orwell in the two books in question. So it is particularly ironic that these are the ones that were pulled.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
The fine print in the EULA probably allows for this, but this is certainly not in the spirit of good and normal commerce and is probably actionable under several state laws and possibly even federal laws.
I have to wonder if this "retraction" of books isn't merely an irony, but an action taken to call attention to certain issues?
Your books are now 'unbooks'. They don't exist. They never existed.
Dislike the Electoral College? Lobby your state to join the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact.
Oh dead tree books are so obsolete, even though they are cheap, last longer than I ever will, can't be altered from a distance, and don't need electricity! Same with CDs, DVDs, and other durable backup media that can't be taken from me and don't depend on some here-today-gone-tomorrow license server! And land lines! Who needs them when we have such fickle and expensive cell phone service with far less coverage!
You know, it's one thing to be a Luddite, and quite another to stay with reliable, cheap, and fully functional technologies until the newer alternatives truly surpass them.
Nineteen Eighty-Four has a very noticeable anti-censorship/information destroying bent to it. This is ironic because it's a coincidence that Nineteen Eighty-Four is the book being removed and it is contradictory in that one of the messages of the book is that information should not be removed which is humerus because it is so obviously going to attract bad publicity when it could have been avoided (yay for schadenfreude).
I'm amazed at this. Not that some company wanted them to do it; but that Amazon did it. All comments about "big, evil corporations" aside - are they trying to kill the Kindle? Don't they see what a PR nightmare this could be?
Why on earth should I buy an expensive electronic book reader from them, EVER, when they've just demonstrated that I might have my legally-purchased books deleted at any time?
#DeleteChrome
It's a safe bet that they'll extend copyright again just as Mickey Mouse is looking like public domain.
You guys in the US won't have a public domain to speak of in a few years.. it'll all be owned by the great grandchildren of once famous authors - the new ruling elite.
Somebody mod this bozo down, and quick! He gets several issues very wrong here. First, the company did have the legal right to sell the Orwell works. However, they chose to stop selling ebooks through Amazon. For whatever reason, Amazon caved into their request that all copies be pulled. Second, you are allowed to sell versions of Public Domain works, much in the same way you are allowed to sell copies of open source software. There's nothing inherently illegal about that.
What are you talking about? Amazon has never sold copies of 1984 or Animal Farm in digital format, and to suggest otherwise is treasonous.
If I were one of the customers who had my book deleted, then I would feel entitled--even compelled--to download a DRM-free copy from the internet.
Have you read "Animal Farm?" If you have, you would know that the power of the people to unite against the power of corporations has long been extinct.
You know what's going to happen? A small but vocal minority will heavily protest and boycott Amazon and the Kindle, while the vast majority of mindless consumers will continue to purchase their goods. Amazon could not possibly care less about this. As a large corporate entity they make money hand over fist. Eventually, if the Kindle becomes sufficiently popular and achieves critical mass, people will simply accept the ability to remotely revoke your ownership rights as part of the normal terms of usage of the device.
ï
The exact same thing happens in Animal Farm. The government, which in actuality is ruled by a privileged elite, leverages the power of propaganda to exploit the worker class under the guise of improving the collective good. Dissent is not tolerated and mercilessly suppressed until the people simply accept the injustice as the reality of life. What the American public has largely failed to grasp is that Orwell's allegory of the dangers of communism is not a specific condemnation of this particular political ideology, but rather, of the dangers of an imbalanced power structure and a malleable, uneducated society. The modern-day corporation has supplanted the role of the communist elite. They are the true puppet masters in today's Western capitalist systems. We have quite vividly observed this phenomenon in the US government's reaction to the past year's economic debacle.
What many people do not realize is that the game is already lost. Americans do not live in a democratic society founded upon the principles of liberty and justice, but an illusion of one, much in the same way that the proletariat class lived under Communism. The average American consumer is as much brainwashed as your typical North Korean.
Not if Amazon remotely turns off non-drm files reading. Man, they can actually erase books remotely, they can't turn off a feature?
IMHO, device vendor and software vendor along with content provider should always be separate with lots of options. It is just like buying iPhone and whining on slashdot about how evil Apple is for not allowing this or that.
Kindle is really something like "amazon owns you, your device, your reading habits, your location".
Erasing 1984 alone is amazing. Perhaps someone really wanted to show what Kindle is and released it illegally on purpose. If it is the case, I am really impressed. It doesn't have to be a "freedom fighter", it could be some amazon rival proxying etc.
Ignorance is strength
War is peace
Freedom is slavery
And the new fourth one:
OWNERSHIP IS DISCRETIONARY
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
I think Amazon did the right thing and according to their official response:
Amazon Kindle Customer Service says:
"These books were added to our catalog using our self-service platform by a third-party who did not have the rights to the books. 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. We are changing our systems so that in the future, books will not be removed from customers' devices in these circumstances."
This is a pretty amazing story. In the Digital Age a distributor fells that they are allowed to invade an electronic device that you own, steal a copy of digital media that you own and force you to accept a refund for something that YOU own.
Let's imagine this happened thirty years ago, or even ten years ago for that matter. A book store sells a book to you and for whatever the publisher decides they don't want to sell the book to you and must have it back. The publisher must now trespass onto your property, break into your house, steal your book, leave a cash refund on your table and then leave your property without any one noticing just to get the book back. A crime has now been committed; namely trespassing, breaking and entering and theft.
Both of these scenarios are exactly the same, except that in today's scenario the book is in a DIGITAL format, which for some magical reason means that a publisher can trespass onto your property and steal something that you own.
In what other context, except the digital context, would behavior like this be tolerated or acceptable, and not to mention legal?
I too will stick to my nice, PRINTED books, thank you very much!
Sure you will... until the firemen show up to BURN them!
Er... we're still on the dystopian fiction kick from the article summary, right?
All hail Big Brother.
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
As a case in point. Go all the way back to the early '70s and suggest to any adult you find that in just a little over a decade their insurance company will have the authority to tell them to change doctors at will and that people will accept that. Just listen to them laugh at you and call the loony bin (on a conveniently located payphone).