It’s hard to take a more than a few steps (hyperlinks, if you will) in cyberspace within the last week or so without bumping into scandalized “news” posts about the recent deletion of two George Orwell books from people’s Kindles.
The short version of the story goes something like this: A company that did not have the rights to sell the books (two of them), put them on Amazon’s digital store through a self-service function. After being notified of the violation by the copyright-holder, Amazon removes the item from their online catalogue and–this is the part that has everyone all in a tizzy–also remotely nuked all of the copies of the book already purchased and on people’s Kindles, refunding the purchase.
Now don’t get me wrong, this wasn’t the greatest decision, and Amazon has publically acknowledged that. And it doesn’t help that one of the books in question is 1984, the irony of which every article makes a point of mentioning, or that the books were removed from Kindle’s without notice of any sort.
But let’s not start ranting about censorship and the end of freedom as we know it. Amazon has stated that they will be making changes so that such an incident doesn’t recurr, and it was clearly a case of copyright violation–physical book would have been pulled from store shelves if something similar had happened in that case. Now, others may use the example of someone coming into your home and removing the book, but that, too, seems like alarmist exaggeration; it is clearly not the same thing. You can’t simply materialize books from a large library into your bookshelves, after all.
EDIT: Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos has posted a public apology for the incident on their website here.