Saturday 12:48pm (18th July 2009)

Some E-Books Are More Equal Than Others - Amazon Unpublishes Books..
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In a story dripping with irony, the New York Times reports that Amazon Kindle has unpublished the Orwell novels 1984 and Animal Farm overnight: "This morning, hundreds of Amazon Kindle owners awoke to discover that books by a certain famous author had mysteriously disappeared from their e-book readers. These were books that they had bought and paid for—thought they owned. But no, apparently the publisher changed its mind about offering an electronic edition, and apparently Amazon, whose business lives and dies by publisher happiness, caved. It electronically deleted all books by this author from people’s Kindles and credited their accounts for the price." Of course with government-protected DRM you never really own anything you buy and it can be revoked at any time. Orwell died in 1950. Under British copyright his works fall into the public domain in 2020 (life plus 70 years). NZ Copyright Term is life plus 50 years rendering his works already in the public domain here. With the obvious parallels with Orwellian visions of the future one must wonder: what would Orwell make of all this?