Amazon vanishes 1984 from Kindles (2009) | Hacker News Reader

Amazon vanishes 1984 from Kindles (2009)

theregister.com

55 pointsecliptik27 comments

This feels like a lazy attribution of "Orwellian". This was a legal copyright issue which is pretty cut and dry, not Amazon silently deleting a book because of its ideological implications. I don't like Amazon, but this is a miss.

Surely, nobody would want an unlicensed copy of a book in their library, would they?! Remember, there are people distributing government reports or even scientific research without proper license! Thankfully, our devices track license status and prevent displaying of such material.

It's not just an unlicensed version though, it's a version that someone sold without permission. This doesn't say Orwellian to me, it says Amazon living within the prevailing legal environment that they operate in.

Correct me if I'm wrong but you can still add 1984 as a document directly to your kindle without any problems.

> a version that someone sold without permission.

I'd call that unlicensed. And fraud too.

> living within the prevailing legal environment

Right. The book 1984 describes a society where it is outlawed to posses old books. So when a company within the prevailing legal framework removes that book written in 1948 from users' devices, the parallels are a bit too strong to not notice.

> you can still add 1984 as a document directly to your kindle

You can. That part was hyperbole on my part. Thankfully. But there are factions that work on making this difficult. Already now cloud companies are scanning for unlicensed copies in private stashes. The fight escalates as copying becomes cheaper.

There are many things to criticize Amazon about, but I feel like removing a e-book that is being fraudulently sold is a stretch. They have to operate with the legal environment.

In this regard we're not close to 1984. It's not every copy of the old book. The users are free to use their refund to re-purchase the book from the copyright holder. Assuming a 1-to-1 price, it would have been smarter to replace the copy (though this has some other interesting ethical problems).

I'm with you in general though. A while back I stopped using Amazon and kindle for a lot of my reading, preferring Calibre/koreader and sourcing from others where possible. Where there is no alternative to Amazon, I quickly export it to Calibre.

I think cloud companies scanning for unlicensed copies is a much better example. It's only a matter of time until someone scans a book manually, and then X cloud company decides it's "unlicensed". Partly solved by client side encryption and/or owncloud, but still.

I recall when I bought a book from a bookstore, but later it turned out the publisher did not have a license. So they hired private security to break into my home, steal my book, and leave money in its place.

Oh sorry, "on a computer". That makes it okay.

If you purchased a car without legal title they would absolutely send a repo man to take it back at your home or at your work. This actually happened to a buddy who bought a car from Canada. It was a lease and the title was fake. GM sent repo men to take the truck back and told him tough shit, sue the seller.

While similar in principal that’s not the same at all in terms of cost or scale.

Based on what? In the case of the car it's a multi-million dollar repo industry for similar events.

For Amazon I'd imagine it would've been a massive lawsuit for copyright violation.

And they would not notify me in advance, simply take it. And if it was in my garage, the repo man would use his master key to break in. And they keep a list of all items everyone has purchased, from cars to things as small and cheap as books, to be taken without notice if any legal issues come up in the future. The surveillance is total, the law is absolute and inescapable, the devices you own are backdoored to betray you.

Compare this to buying a physical book, with cash.

If you don't find this Orwellian, I don't know what to say.

What do you think "Orwellian" means?

"It denotes an attitude and a brutal policy of draconian control by propaganda, surveillance, disinformation, denial of truth (doublethink), and manipulation of the past" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orwellian

Emphasis mine. Or are you trying to imply a single incident should encompass all those descriptors, before qualifying as Orwellian? If so, wouldn't that disqualify most incidents in 1984 itself?

I’m really not sure how trying to operate within the legal framework of a society is “surveillance” or “draconian control by propaganda” (the last two words you left unemphasized even though they change the meaning drastically). I guess surveillance is the closest, but this is likely just functionality in place to process returns, not some surveillance mechanism to make sure people don’t have banned books? If they remove someone’s book for no reason (or ideological/opposed to the book), then sure that would be “Orwellian”.

That example is entirely different, Amazon probably needs to have this functionality to process returns making it the same process for them to avoid legal ramifications.

It would be Orwellian if they did it for their own ideological purposes, sure. No evidence points to that being the case.

I’m not really sure what else to tell you. Welcome to American techno-capitalism? There are obviously massive problems of surveillance, missing tech legislation, tech monopolies, and a general thirst for technology adoption without observance of the potential ramifications.

Maybe you are to young, but at that time ~nobody was aware that content on YOUR device could be altered or deleted from the outside, that it was 1984 was just the cherry on the cake.

If you get same results with copyright that you'd get with totalitarian dictatorship then maybe ....

It's El Reg. They are witty. It's a joke.

Back when this happened and the article was written, (really - 12 years ago now!) they didn't have the full story, but it was pretty much the first of this sort of thing that Amazon had to handle. They did review, admitted they'd handled it badly and stated they'd not repeat it, as I recall...

The thing about wit and parodies and sarcasm is that not everyone is able to identify it.

There are plenty of examples of parody sites being cited as if they practiced journalism.

> "There are plenty of examples of parody sites being cited as if they practiced journalism."

I frequently see folks post "articles" from "The Onion" to prove their point about some crackpot conspiracy idea they've got stuck in their heads from something they read on Facebook (probably another "The Onion" post re-shared as "fact").

Sure but Amazon isn’t that far away from banning books based on ideology. They have issued a ban for certain books already (https://www.foxnews.com/media/amazon-bans-books-that-frame-t...), and have banned ads for other books that don’t violate their ideological policy but draw attention from activists (https://quillette.com/2020/11/07/gender-activists-are-trying...). From what I have heard, they’re under significant internal activist pressure to ban books (that don’t align with progressive American politics) with some regularity. They can’t be trusted to hold this line unless they regain a mission orientation and shut down internal political activism.

“Shutdown internal political activism”. You obviously haven’t read Orwell if you don’t think that’s equally or more Orwellian.

This was a pretty eye-opening lesson for me at the time. I will never buy a Kindle.

and would rather buy from a copyright infringing publisher, that allows you to keep the illegal copy of your book?

I don't understand What do you think Amazon should have done here?

It recieved a book copyright infringing, it removed the book from it's devices, and refunded the customers.

Amazon may have done pretty spooky stuff, kindle books are often overpriced. But you making a opinion that Kindle devices are clearly bad, just from a isolated incident related to their store seems pretty short sighted.

This is equivalent of saying, "Facebook removed my post for copyright infringement, I will never use the internet".

Facebook can do whatever they want with the data they store on their servers, because it's their service and their data.

The fact that Amazon could reach into my device and mess with the contents of my library means it's not actually my device, it's Amazon's device and Amazon's library. I'm not going to pay for a device which gives me less control over my library than I'd have if I bought actual paper books.

Why is it any of Amazon's business which books I have in my library, or what their copyright status happens to be?

Yeah, you can argue it's not your Library, it's Amazon's library. Cause technically, you don't own the book you are using on your kindle, you're just leasing it's content for viewing. If you did put the book there yourself (obtained externally, say a .mobi file), Amazon would not be able to take it away. You own the device hardware, you own whatever you put on it. But it would be unfair to the author if you got to keep something that Amazon "stole" from them, even if you bought it from amazon.

But this would be a issue with any content with the current IP laws. And isn't anything wrong with the Kindle itself. Imagine if you bought a book, photocopied it, and returned it. This is what letting you keep the book will be equivalent to.

Famous quote:

"Irony can be pretty ironic at times." --Cmdr Murdock

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