Wednesday, July 22, 2009

Life Imitating Fiction

In the Novel 1984 by George Orwell Winston Smith works as a Journalist whose job it is to rewrite Oceania's libraries and journals to exclude information that the controlling political party finds unfavourable.

1984 is a work of fiction, but CBC Reports that Amazon removed 1984 from it's electronic marketplace, without notification to it's customers. All Kindles that had bought the novel had their copies remotely removed, customers refunded the difference and all as if the novel had never been listed or bought in the first place.
The reason for this is that the electronic copy of 1984 that Amazon had been selling was licensed to Amazon from someone who didn't have permission by the IP holder to do so. Amazon has been going through it's electronic library and correcting many such mistakes recently, but the fact that they have the ability to reach out to customer's Kindles and automatically eras novels or even change the contents of it's library in realtime, just like the totalitarian state in 1984 is very scary.