Not a direct telecom issue, but very, very, close ------- summary: Due to some legal and copyright issue whose specifics aren't quite clear yet, Amazon _deleted_ copies of "books" that people had already downloaded.
Eyup. Not future copies, but ones you had already purhcased and downloaded.
(Now how many people even knew that could happen?).
In a unique bit of irony, the books in question included a version of... "1984".
one story among many, many, others:
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_____________________________________________________ Knowledge may be power, but communications is the key snipped-for-privacy@panix.com [to foil spammers, my address has been double rot-13 encoded]
It's information and the Kindle works over Sprint's PCS network, so I'd call it telecom.
So, what happens when someone writes a tell-all book about a current or former president and the powers that be don't like it? Will it vanish from everyone's Kindles in the middle of the night?
I'm guessing that when you purchase a Kindle and/or books for it, you agree to grant them full access to do whatever they want. But it's tales like these that make me thankful for the free and open source movement.
Stuff like that makes me very glad that I have a personal library full of real, anonymously purchased 'ink on paper' books.
There has to be a total top-to-bottom rethink of the entire concept of 'copyright' in the next few years due to the rapid changes in technology and the growing fears that entire segments of our popular culture are vanishing under iron cloaks of copyright. I'm seriously wondering how much of our pop culture of the past few decades, especially with music, will be lost on future generations simply because the copyright owners are trying so hard to keep it all bottled up. Just try to harmlessly attach a fun rock song from the 1960s or 1970s to a YouTube video clip, for example.
Another example, how many of us younger than 40 or 50 can remember such pop-culture icons as Speedy Gonzales or Charlie Chan? Yep, bottled up by the copyright owners simply because they feel that they are 'un-PC'.
Or even the historically important news coverages of the 2001-09-11 attack....
Cheers, -- tlvp -- Avant de repondre, jeter la poubelle, SVP
***** Moderator's Note *****
The Holy Grail of the publishing industry has always been finding a way to reduce the uncertainty of putting paper and ink on a retailer's shelf. This is why "brand name" authors command such high royalties, and why sequel after sequel appear in lockstep just before the Christmas buying season and the summer vacation season.
Kindle, and all the copycats to come later, is the end of the publisher's rainbow. It reduces the risk of publishing, i.e., the investment required in editing staff, typesetters, bookbinders, and truck drivers, to zero. Consider the implications:
The cost of distributing an e-book is essentially zero: after all, the readers have paid for the display device and the transport channel.
The cost of editing staff is dramatically reduced: since the publisher can revise works which have already been "published", it can economize on the editing chore, push the goods out the door in time for the major shopping seasons, and "edit" them later, at their leisure.
The cost of insurance is also cut: if an author like Gail Sheehy looses a lawsuit that claims "Passages" was plagiarized, then it's a simple matter to re-assign some part of the authorship to Roger Gould, re-apportion future royalties as needed to make up for the judgement, and pretend that someone wasn't asleep at the "prior art" switch.
Libraries become relics of the past(I). The publishers want to be able to control every aspect of every work they've paid for, including who gets to read it. With paper, it's impossible; with e-books, it's a trivial coding change.
Censorship becomes routine. E-books will be licensed in such a way that parents who choose not to allow their kids to see "Lady Chatterley's Lover" will be able to lock the child's Kindle device to prevent it. Moreover, they'll be able to prevent schools from downloading e-books they don't like into their children's' machines, so that requiring children to read Darwin becomes a practical impossibility as soon as the cost of paper copies exceeds the budget of the school library.
I'm sure you get the idea. All of the steps I've listed above will be taken for sound business reasons, and all of them will insinuate themselves into our public mind "for the good of the children" or other fashionable excuse, and all of them will have the effect of limiting education to those who can afford to pay the publishers for the privilege. Don't assume that classic works like "1984" will be exempted when their copyright expires: copyright laws are amazingly malleable in a world of billion-dollar political campaigns, and the U.S. Congress has been very receptive to the idea that highly profitable movies and songs deserve special extensions. That will soon apply to e-books as well.
FWIW. YMMV. IANAL.
Bill Horne
I.) As with copying of music and other artworks, pundits have always debated whether libraries help or hurt the publishing industry. On one side, the publishers, who want to sell more books: on the other, the sociologists who say that only a literate and well-educated populace buys books, ergo they must have libraries to encourage them to read. Carnegie and other library benefactors were not being charitable: they simply knew that poor children with curious minds make excellent managers when they have access to knowledge.
Time, however, has marched on: I predict that in the future, the elites of our society will act to limit the lower classes' access to knowledge, on the theory that a strong back is a terrible thing to waste and that there are plenty of well-educated people in India who can be hired for a few rupees. The fact is that stupid voters are a lot easier to manage than intelligent ones.
- I guess it also extends to reducing the number of prufweeders...
("loses", not "looses").
-- _____________________________________________________ Knowledge may be power, but communications is the key snipped-for-privacy@panix.com [to foil spammers, my address has been double rot-13 encoded]
***** Moderator's Note *****
Everyone's a critic ...
... but you make my point for me. If I'm publishing the digest as a web page, I can change typos and grammatical errors before most viewers see them. If a powerful politician objects to some inconvenient truth that's in an e-book, the publisher can delete it from the book _after_ it has been sold.
The authors I read, well many of them, encourage use of libraries because they want their stories to be read. I got hooked on Dean Koontz by checking out a couple from the library and then have bought many of his books. Without the library I probably would never have read anything of his.
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