Big Brother is indeed watching
As a full-fledged booknerd, I follow news and views about Amazon’s Kindle pretty closely. The Kindle fascinates me, as do the people who use them. If your nerdly predilections are of a different bent, you might have missed the story about Amazon removing 1984 from user’s Kindles due to some sort of copyright infringement. Of all the books in all of the land to delete, the only one that could me more ironic than George Orwell’s 1984 (which has a lot to do with the government editing the news) would have been Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 (about government outlawing books).
But this isn’t about irony. No, this is about the slippery, slide-y ownership issues of electronic files and who gets to control the devices that hold those files.
My mind can’t quite get around the fact that even after someone has purchased a Kindle and purchased a book from Amazon (sure under hinky circumstances but that’s besides the point) that the company can still go into their device and erase that book.
Sure on a rational level it makes sense that Amazon would recall 1984 to avoid a copyright lawsuit, but the fact that they can even do that gives me the creeps. Do consumers really want a company to have that kind of control over their stuff? But more importantly did Kindle users even realize that Amazon had that power?
Yuck.
Can you imagine if Apple exercised the same power over an iPod? I would wager you’d be hard-pressed to find an iPod that didn’t contain an ill-gotten, illegally downloaded song. The outcry if such a thing happened would be deafening.
