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ExamForce :: Article Archive :: Newsletter Article
 The Cert Times: IT Edition Article Archive
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| Stupid Irony, Now In Concentrated Amazon Formula! (B1N@RY N@T10N (A.J. Axline)) |
There is bitter irony; there is sweet irony. There is Alanis Morissette irony, which really isn't ironic at all (...don't you think?). There is dramatic irony, there is comedic irony, there is tragic irony. If you're a lady, you may own a curling irony.
And then, there is stupid irony. Double-dog stupid irony. Sheer dumbass, natural selection, clueless, brainless, helpless, hopeless stupid irony.
And then, there is Amazon stealing into people's Kindles and deleting purchased copies of George Orwell's "1984" and "Animal Farm."
Yes, there were licensing issues with these books. The publisher who uploaded the titles to Amazon's catalog believed that the Orwell titles in question fell under the public domain, which is incorrect. Yes, Amazon should not have sold these particular versions to Kindle owners.
But man, oh man. There is a right way and a wrong way to go about solving an issue of this nature, and Amazon's midnight reverse-theft strategy was so far in the wrong, it officially constitutes a new direction that heretofore did not exist in physical space.
It would have been the wrong way to go no matter what the products in question were. Amazon should have come clean, notified the affected customers, fully explained the details behind the error, and offered each customer a choice between having the content deleted and receiving a refund (and perhaps a special discount code for their next purchase to make up for Amazon's error), or having the content deleted and replaced with a legitimately licensed copy of the book(s) in question.
But... wasn't there a single person in the room where this decision was made who saw the media debacle to come?
"Okay, we sold copies of Orwell's classic novels decrying totalitarianism, social injustice, and the centralized control of information, and we shouldn't have sold them because they are illegally-licensed copies. We need to remedy this situation. Thoughts?"
"Umm... why don't we do what A.J. Axline suggested a couple of paragraphs ago?"
"Too responsible! We don't want to appear responsible here. Responsibility is a killer in the marketplace. You're fired. Anyone else?"
"Well, we could just use our existing capability to remotely access all of the Kindles out there, and delete the books without any intervention by the user."
"...We can do that?"
"Sure. Kindle owners are just that: they own the hardware device that they hold in their hands. The actual data stored on the Kindle? We own and control all of that. Kindle owners just 'license' it from us. We could change the text of a book if the publisher asked us to. Or, we could revoke the license of a book that was judged to be a threat to homeland security. Not that we would, of course. But we could do it... just like we can delete this Orwell guy's books. No biggie."
(pause button)
See, this would have been the moment for someone in the room to slide Neuron A into Slot B and foresee that this action would result in a news bite so juicy, the media and blogosphere would jump on it like Oprah on a pork chop. Attention Corporate Drones: Any time your company is about to do something that is going to generate headlines that read like they came from The Onion, it's a good time to intervene. Unfortunately, there wasn't someone in the room able to add "remotely delete" and "Big Brother" together into the obvious resulting furore.
The real pity here is that Amazon's content deletion boner has just urinated all over the entire digital content marketplace. The biggest barrier to acceptance of digital content is that the people who purchase it are uneasily concerned that they don't actually "own" anything. It's all just bits on a hardware device. Ask anyone who has had their hard drive crap the bed when they didn't have every piece of purchased digital content backed up somewhere, how they feel about the true nature of "ownership" of digital content.
Amazon has very publicly torn the lid off of a particularly squirmy can of worms. It's something that all Kindle owners out there, not just the Orwell fans, should be concerned about. And by concerned, I mean shouting at Amazon's customer service at the top of your lungs until they revisit their Kindle content terms of usage.
I mean, what's next? The brutal, heavy-handed censorship of electronic newsletters? I don't think tha
A.J. Axline
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Posted by
nam on 29/07/2009 09:47 |
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