“An Amazon spokesman, Drew Herdener, said in an e-mail message that the books were added to the Kindle store by a company that did not have rights to them, using a self-service function. ‘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,’ he said.”
(Via Amazon Erases Orwell Books From Kindle.)
Three things:
- How hard would it have been for Amazon to email the customers in advance of the deletion? (BTW, I’m a big Amazon fan, but they totally screwed up here)
- What do “U.S.” rights and “Australian” rights mean in today’s world? It doesn’t make sense. Movies that are released in one market but not another, books that are released on different dates in different countries, CDs that are released as “imports” with different tracks. Stupid.
- How long is copyright anyway? I thought that 1984 was in the public domain? (I know I read it online, perhaps “illegally”)
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