Thousands of people last week discovered that Amazon had quietly removed electronic copies of George Orwell's 1984 from their Kindle e-book readers. In the process, Amazon revealed how easy censorship will be in the Kindle age.
In this case, the mass e-book removals were motivated by copyright . A
company called MobileReference, who did not own the copyrights to the
books 1984 and Animal Farm, uploaded both books to the
Kindle store and started selling them. When the rights owner heard
about this, they contacted Amazon and asked that the e-books be removed.
And Amazon decided to erase them not just from the store, but from all
the Kindles where they'd been downloaded. Amazon operators used the
Kindle wireless network, called WhisperNet, to quietly delete the books
from people's devices and refund them the money they'd paid.
i09
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