The web has been buzzing (gotta love Gizmodo) about Amazon’s controversial move to automatically delete certain copies of George Orwell’s 1984 and Animal Farm from customers’ Kindles.
David Pogue, who appears to have been the first to report on the incident, set off a firestorm by omitting a key fact – that the ebooks were essentially pirated copies sold by a company that had no rights to the material – from his original blog post just before 1:00 pm EST yesterday (NYTimes got the full story straight in an article it published to its website much later in the day).
Turns out the Orwell e-books were added to the Kindle store via a self-service function by a company called Mobile Reference. Mobile Reference, which offers public domain books for around $1, however, did not have the right to sell Orwell’s novels because 1984 and Animal Farm are still under copyright protection in the U.S.
Related coverage at: TechCrunch, Technologizer, betanews, Amazon Kindle Community
