Saturday, July 18, 2009

Re: "1984"

Source: "Amazon Erases Orwell Books From Kindle," BRAD STONE, The New York Times, July 17, 2009.

In George Orwell’s “1984,” government censors erase all traces of news articles embarrassing to Big Brother by sending them down an incineration chute called the “memory hole.”

On Friday, it was “1984” and another Orwell book, “Animal Farm,” that were dropped down the memory hole — by Amazon.com.
Amazon apparently is learning to check for ownership of copyright before selling digital copies.

We are all learning that what we regard as our property may not be our property, simply because we have paid for it. Apparently Amazon not only removed the book from the memories of Kindles owned by its customers, but did so without prior warning, and in the process removed their bookmarks and notes made on the books, which should clearly have been the intellectual property of the authors of those notes. Indeed, I would guess that sufficient annotation, bookmarking and other inputs might constitute a transformation of the original document, and if so might give the Kindle owner/user intellectual property rights to the materials taken from their property by Amazon.

The article also says:
While the copyright on “1984” will not expire until 2044 in the United States, it has already expired in other countries, including Canada, Australia and Russia. Web sites in those countries offer digital copies of the book free to all comers.
The controversy caught my attention in part because I have been involved in a discussion with copyright issues with respect for Zunia, the new portal for international development information which has replaced the Development Gateway "knowledge communities". This whole area of distribution of digital documents is hard to understand, and hard to get on top of.

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