Orwellian indeed
July 17th, 2009 | by jz | Published in Future of the Internet | 12 Comments
David Pogue just blogged about a fascinating memory hole leak in the Kindle: customers who purchased at least one version of the classic Nineteen Eighty-Four found their copies of the book simply vanished from their readers. Amazon’s apparent explanation:
The Kindle edition books Animal Farm by George Orwell. Published by MobileReference (mobi) & Nineteen Eighty-Four (1984) by George Orwell. Published by MobileReference (mobi) were removed from the Kindle store and are no longer available for purchase. When this occured, your purchases were automatically refunded. You can still locate the books in the Kindle store, but each has a status of not yet available. Although a rarity, publishers can decide to pull their content from the Kindle store.
Another fascinating aspect of the Cloud: everything is rented rather than owned, and can be taken away with only a refund to show for it. I worry about this phenomenon here and here in my book — I just didn’t have any good examples at the time of writing. My concern isn’t just about publishers having second thoughts about their material. It’s the tool handed to regulators: someone could allege defamation for a passage in a book and a court, aside from awarding damages, could order Amazon to excise the offending passage retroactively. Same for politically sensitive speech:
Imagine a world in which all copies of once-censored books like Candide, The Call of the Wild, and Ulysses had been permanently destroyed at the time of the censoring and could not be studied or enjoyed after subsequent decision-makers lifted the ban. In a world of tethered appliances, the primary backstop against perfectly enforced mistakes would have to come from the fact that there would be different views about what to ban found among multiple sovereigns—so a particular piece of samizdat might live on in one jurisdiction even as it was made difficult to find in another.
It looks like the particular complaint here is that the book was eliminated from the online “archive” that Amazon maintains for one’s Kindle purchases; I can’t tell if copies stored on Kindles themselves were actually deleted over Amazon’s direct-to-Kindle wireless network, but at least one user reports that Kindle copies are killed too. The version removed is by a publisher called MobileReference (appearing to specialize in public domain works) and sold for $.99; another version from Houghton-Mifflin for $9.99 is still available. One possibility is that the work is in public domain in some places but not others — making it trickier to sell through the Kindle store, though the store does have some sense of a customer’s location. But even if Amazon were mistakenly selling the book without clearing rights — it’s a new feature of a cloud-based e-book vs. a regular book that “mistakes” can be wiped clean with the touch of a button. For more thoughts on that, see the curious case of TiVo v. EchoStar.
And seriously — to put 1984 down the memory hole is just too … ironic? Or is it fitting?
Update 18 July 2009: Amazon has issued the following statement describing the situation as arising from a copyright issue. Of course, paper books could not be similarly recalled — bug or feature?
Hi Jonathan,
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 we will not remove books from customers’ devices in these circumstances.
Thx,
DrewDrew Herdener
Director of Communications
Update 24 July 2009: Jeff Bezos has posted an apology:
This is an apology for the way we previously handled illegally sold copies of 1984 and other novels on Kindle. Our “solution” to the problem was stupid, thoughtless, and painfully out of line with our principles. It is wholly self-inflicted, and we deserve the criticism we’ve received. We will use the scar tissue from this painful mistake to help make better decisions going forward, ones that match our mission.
With deep apology to our customers,
Jeff Bezos
Founder & CEO
Amazon.com
It’s hard to ask for more than that — I’m eager to see the ways in which Amazon can structure the Kindle so that not only Amazon, but those who might try to regulate Amazon, have limits to what they can do.
July 17th, 2009 at 2:54 pm (#)
And if the cloud rental were free to begin with, a refund would be of little consolation.
July 17th, 2009 at 2:55 pm (#)
.
It’s perfect.
July 17th, 2009 at 8:29 pm (#)
I feel companies should be obliged to inform their customers of the deletion before it happens. Although a different case, money that I had invested in a Second Life bank “disappeared” because Linden Lab decided not to host financial institutions. I couldn’t even get a refund from the bank. I don’t know much about consumer protection laws, but we should be thinking of consumer protection for virtual assets too.
July 17th, 2009 at 8:32 pm (#)
I wonder if this could be the subject of a class action suit. Here is my point: suppose a customer gets halfway through a book and then the book disappears from his/her Kindle. So, despite the refund, there is actual damage to that customer, namely the time already invested in reading that portion of the book.
July 18th, 2009 at 3:03 am (#)
[...] och inte längre vill tillhandahålla digitala utgåvor av sina böcker har mött kritik, för att uttrycka det milt. Det intressanta med tilltaget är dock att det illustrerar ett exempel på en konflikt som inte [...]
July 18th, 2009 at 4:35 am (#)
Surely there are several quite distinct issues here.
One is the durability of purchases of eBooks: I can imagine being quite relaxed about this. If Amazon gets a reputation for quietly deleting your Kindle content, I suspect they will not sell many more Kindles. So, provided they do not attain a monopoly position, the consumer protection issues seem fairly minor.
The general case, that all content may reside in the cloud, and be rented and not owned, is a much more profound issue for society. It seems to me hopeful that we will continue to have a mixed economy, with the option of buying content to own (aka a perpetual licence), as well as having many things available on a subscription basis. This does need technological support, and the ideal solutions do not yet exist. Whether regulation is needed in the foreseeable future is not clear: could you frame a requirement that perpetual licences were incapable of being revoked/annulled by technology? – or would that just provoke more vendors into selling subscription licences only?
And then there’s the Orwellian vision of content being subject to silent revision (or deletion). Clearly, this is the most sinister, and broadly plausible (it would never be perfect, but convincing most of the people most of the time would suffice). One of the most profound failures of the digital age is that we have not updated the concept of legal deposit libraries. Is it too late to develop a requirement for content to be deposited – in such a way as to be perpetually available to the “library”‘s readers, and freely available when the copyright expires?
July 19th, 2009 at 5:43 pm (#)
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July 24th, 2009 at 11:21 am (#)
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