Recall how simple it was for the state to get private companies to cooperate in their unconstitutional secret surveillance of everyone through the NSA. It will be that easy for them to do with censorship, via a threat to the company, delivered secretly through the "Justice" Department. This incident does not involve pressure from the state, but it just as easily could.
"Regardless of whether you believe Amazon's promise to leave your Kindle alone, the company has tipped its hand and shown us the dark side of a culture where books are only available in electronic form. If the WhisperNet service from Kindle allows the company to delete books silently from your device, what other information might they have access to? Can the company monitor what you're reading and when - and then hand that over to law enforcement? Can it replace a book file with a different file whose content is changed?
Perhaps more than anything else, this mass deletion of 1984 has made it clear that collecting e-books is going to require some technical know-how. No e-book is truly yours unless you can get it off your Kindle and onto your computer - hopefully a computer that isn't connected to the internet."
Looks like those old style paper books are looking better and better all the time!
Unfortunately, this is old news - it happened in 2009, and was widely discussed at the time.
ReplyDeleteAlso, it was an illegal edition of '1984', and Amazon felt obliged to remove it on those grounds - it didn't actually have the right to sell it. Sure, that decision should have been announced and discussed before they did it, and purchasers should have been offered an alternate, legal edition: but they weren't out to 'censor' anything - just put right a wrong that had been done to the rights holder. This case wasn't as simplistic as it might appear.
Correct, it did not involve the government, but the secrecy of it all, and subsequent, separate, developments with the way government agencies the NSA easily obtained the cooperation of private companies similar to Amazon, to act illegally, is a warning for us. If we don't keep in mind that our government seems to think it's ok to do something they really want, even if it is illegal, we won't notice when they take the next step and attempt to control our access to news, to literature, and who knows what else, in secret underhanded ways.
DeletePeter, you seem to have missed the larger point. Swanson graciously points it out to you in his reply, though in a rather muddled fashion.
DeleteThe problem is the ease and surreptitiousness with which this happened. The issue is one of textual integrity. Kind of the difference between owning gold coins stored in your own secure location, or owning gold options which only exist as a magnetic record on some hard drive. Someone (not even necessarily your broker) chooses to move a decimal place, and who are you to prove otherwise?