Quote:
Originally Posted by torifile
Remotely deleting legally purchased merchandise should be a crime. It's reverse piracy. Or something.
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Really, Amazon shouldn't have sold a book "published" by people who had no rights to the text in the first place. That's what it comes down to -
that's where Amazon fucked up. It's kind of scary that Amazon didn't catch that at all.
They refunded people's money, and there's other (legal) Orwell e-books on the Kindle store, so I'm willing to kind of give them a pass just this once. But it had better not become a commonplace thing. Like, if it happens once, it's an inconvenience, like "oh, that kind of sucks that I have to download another copy that won't have my place kept in it," but it's not the end of the world. But if it starts to happen often, or if it happens to a text that isn't so readily available (and Kindle owners are left with no substitutes), that would mega, mega suck.
It is a bit ironic that it was
Nineteen Eighty-Four, but I don't think this is really that Big Brother-y. I'm going to be an optimist and say that by making great literature more accessible to the masses, Amazon is doing more to prevent us from the future of randomized, machine-created works of "art" depicted in
Nineteen Eighty-Four.
Orwell's masterpiece doesn't become public domain in the United States until 2044.
Yikes.