I think you mean “vaporise” it.
Per the link in my post above, they refunded everybody and apologized. (NB: I don’t own a Kindle, I think Amazon screwed up in not warning people, and appreciate that they apologized and said they won’t do this again.)
How anyone can own the rights to 1984 at this point is beyond me.
Whew! I knew Van Halen would never go the lame synth-rock route…
Per your link they won’t do it again “in these circumstances”, which would imply that they may do it again in some other circumstances :dubious:
shrug Not that I own a Kindle, nor did I have any plans to buy one. Of course after hearing about this Kindle is now on my Will Never Buy-list.
So, they didn’t really delete it, they just deleted it? What kind of doublespeak is this?
The relevant distinction is that Amazon did not actively go onto people’s Kindles and actually delete the file there. It got deleted because of the way the Kindles synchronize with home base. In the context of whether or not you’re allowed to keep a book you paid for, the distinction isn’t relevant, but in the context of personal privacy, it does matter. Amazon deleted their copy, not each individual copy residing on each individual Kindle. It just happens that Kindles are designed to make sure both you and Amazon each have a copy.
I find it most amusing in a thread which seems to flame propaganda, that they are disinclined to quote the major part of the article:
This wasn’t an act of censorship, plain and simple.
At least you were still born. 
Don’t you find the whole situation pretty disturbing? In the “cloud” where we are apparently going to live for the next era, nothing really belongs to you and you don´t have any privacy whatsoever.
Not a censorship issue, a bad PR issue and yet another clear-cut example of why buying DRM’ed electronic files from any mass merchandiser is a horrible idea.
Yeah, this isn’t about censorship as the term is usually used; this is about DRM and copyright issues. Which isn’t to deny that it was still a fiasco which exposes good reason to be upset with the way of the world… it’s just that the target of the ire needs to be appropriately selected.
No, it’s ALSO about censorship issues. They’ve just demonstrated that they can if they feel like delete books they don’t like. I assume they could also replace them with edited versions and replace what you bought with them. Probably without you even knowing.
As long as they can do that and get away with it, I have no desire for a Kindle. I’ll just buy paper books that I actually own and aren’t subject to remote deletion and modification.
Not really, no. The money was refunded, which is a better deal than you get with a physical item.
http://www.ibc.ca/en/Insurance_Crime/Auto_Theft/Stolen_Cars_Victims_and_Thieves.asp
I’ll also note that, while Orwell was writing against any sort of totalitarian regime, one of the prime examples while he was writing was the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union was a place which didn’t agree with the idea of personal property nor the ability to profit from your own works.
You will in fact note that George Orwell did in fact copyright his novel (something which he had full rights to forgo), as evidenced by this occurence, and he most assuredly did personally profit by, as did his widow and later his son.
Alright, fair enough. It’s about censorship to the extent that DRM provides the means for censorship.
:dubious: Yes and obviously I’m displaying my desire for censorship by burning books as a way to stay warm in a snowstorm, since it’s demonstrating my ability to remove books from the planet whenever I feel like it…
There are only too few rolleyes.
A poor analogy. A better one would be if you installed radio controlled incendiaries in books so you could burn them in other people’s homes.
Yeah…
First of all, this isn’t censorship by any definition of the term. Even setting aside the “only the government can censor things” argument, censorship means banning or bowdlerizing books. Amazon did not do this – they removed a book that should never have been sold to you in the first place. And not because of content or a political agenda, but because this was an illegal copy.
Your money was stolen from you. Instead of paying it to the Orwell estate and their publisher, you paid it to someone who had no right to sell you the book. If you have any respect for Orwell at all, you should see that the book was ripped off* and that no one should benefit from that crime – not the person ripping off the estate, nor you by having the pirated copy. Amazon credited your account, too; as others have pointed out, you wouldn’t get that if you bought a pirated hard copy.
I see this sort of thing essential. Otherwise you’d see fewer good books since authors wouldn’t get paid for them.
*1984 – as Asimov pointed out – is merely an rote extrapolation of the old Soviet Union. And the old Soviet Union was notorious for pirating books. Essentially, the people who pirated the book are acting like Big Brother.
Welcome to the wonderful world of extended copyright.
This statement copyrighted for the next 101 years. Pay up, bitches !