The NYT and the whole of the blogosphere are reporting on the strange disappearance of Orwell’s “1984″ and “Animal Farm” from Kindle readers (not just the store but the readers themselves). I’m unhappy with Kindle’s proprietary ways and personally regard it as a futile attempt to give a bit of life of the old model of copyright in the digital age. But in this case, the blame really should be placed on the publisher Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, another example of an overbuilt, overstaffed, old-world firm that hopes to live off its government-granted monopolies for years to come.
But how much hope can they really have when versions of 1984 are all over the web? Google this for 1984, or this for Animal Farm. Keep in mind that it only takes one of these to appear online for a few minutes one time for the infinite possibilities of digital distribution to be effected. No government grant of monopoly can survive this kind of overwhelming opposition. There are limits to how much litigation even the most well-heeled publisher can fund and sustain.
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Do you say,”removed from a kindle device” {censored Your device}, or “removed from store selling to device”?
The first choice is blatant ‘Big Brother’. The second is still big brother, though. Just no capital fonts.
“An Amazon spokesman, Drew Herdener, said in an e-mail message that the books were added to the Kindle store by a company that did not have rights to them, using a self-service function. “When we were notified of this by the rights holder, we removed the illegal copies from our systems and from customers’ devices, and refunded customers,†he said.”
If Amazon, a company that on a daily basis tells state revenue departments to kiss its electronic rear-end every time they threaten it for not collecting sales tax, immediately cowers in a corner and goes so far as to rip the copies from its customer’s hands after receiving a single letter from a publisher’s attorney, then I would hardly say copyright is defunct.
Copyright is not only finished because technology makes it unenforceable; for all thinking people and Austrians it is finished intellectually. One reading of ‘Against Intelectual Monopoly’ will convince anyone reasonable that copyright is wrong for humans in the same way slavery, theft and violence are and that it must be abandoned, to be replaced with nothing.
I’m no fan of proprietary formats but I do love my Kindle (both the first and second gen). There are other ways of safeguarding your content (though Amazon has said they will no longer delete material from Kindles). I read a lot digital texts. Especially stuff I pull from this site. I wish Mises.org had more books in a format other than PDF. PDFs can be converted but they don’t look the best. Mobipocket (mobi, prc) can be read on the Kindle and Microsoft Reader (lit) and ePub can easily be converted to Mobipocket. Do copyrights prevent Mises.org from putting these books up in other formats?
Quote from Spider Mattheson: “I wish Mises.org had more books in a format other than PDF.”
This fact alone is enough for me to not buy a Kindle. I have an old Sony e-Reader that handles PDFs with no problem and allows me to carry around in my pocket virtually every book from the Mises Institute. Amazon needs to fix this problem.
Clearly Mr. Tucker has no insight into the staffing (or anything else) at HMH given the inaccuracies of his statements. In addition, he is apparently misinformed about the government’s role in reviewing/approving mergers. That role is one to protect consumers from monopolies–not create them. If it’s publishing in general or the historical nature of copyrights you don’t like–just say so. Why lambast the one publisher that happened to get caught in this Kindle situation?
J. Cacciola:
Tucker may be wrong about the structure at HMH in particular, in your opinion, but what he is correct about is that they are using GOVERNMENT COPYRIGHT MONOPOLY to collect rents on a 60 year old book.
It is not “publishing in general” that Mr. Tucker is upset at, for he is a publisher. It is not the “historical nature of copyrights” (whatever that means), though through history copyrights have stifled creativity and enriched the politically connected.
It also seems that Mr. Cacciola is apparently misinformed about the government’s role in reviewing/approving mergers. There is no concern for “protecting consumers” as much as making sure that the government has power over the private economy – to approve those mergers that fit the central planner’s ideology and reject those that might hurt their political clout.
Why ‘lambast’ the one blogger who happened to point out the futility and injustice of enforcing IP laws over mass-distribution digital formats?
Here’s something (not about copyright, per se, but about IP in general) I can’t seem to figure out. Perhaps someone better-versed in the merits of IP protection can enlighten me.
I’m a woodworker. I make chairs, among other things. They look pretty much like most other chairs, and they definitely perform the same function as pretty much every other chair in existence…that is, to prevent the user from having to sit on the floor. I don’t hold a patent on the chair. In fact, as far as I’ve been able to discern, no one holds a patent on the chair. I can make as many of them as I want without fear of the patent police showing up and hauling off my table saw for patent infringement.
Now comes the really bizarre (I mean crazy, whacked-out, who’da thunk it mad) thing…I still manage to make a profit selling the chairs I make. What I don’t understand is how it’s possible that I can make and sell a chair at a profit if anyone else who has such an inclination can do the exact same thing? I really can’t wrap my head around this one, since it’s “obvious” that no one would have any incentive to produce anything ever if not guaranteed monopoly privilege. Can someone please explain how this is possible? I’m stumped.
Alexander and Ron,
Ironically, I used slightly different versions of what both of you wrote here in discourse that I had with an entertainment lawyer regarding IP and specifically royalty payments. As of late, bars and restaurants have been sued by BMI and ASCAP for not paying the thieves (BMI/ASCAP/SESAC) for the rights to play music at their venues. I was told that if I did not like the current system, that “silence is golden”.
@Jeffrey_Tucker: Couldn’t you make the same argument you just did about child pornography? That since after one file goes up, it’s impossible to take down, so why bother going after the people that distribute the stuff?
I don’t mean to bring up an inflammatory topic, but I think it makes the point: enforceability also depends on the public’s agreement with the law being enforced. There’s a great quote going around from the 1840s by a member of Parliament, talking about how if copyright terms are extended, it will destroy the benefits of copyright law, because such long terms would delegitimize copyright law in the eyes of the public, and thus make it easier to violate.
How right he turned out to be! Today copyright law is endlessly extended, destroying public goodwill.
Amazon remotely deleted copies of books that had already been purchased by the consumer and were stored on the consumer’s equipment. That doesn’t shock me; I know that proprietary software/firmware is beholden to the demands of the government-industrial complex. So I use linux.
Linux is open-source software that is written by the end user, for the end user. It can legally be copied by anyone. And it doesn’t have built-in DRM, or _NSAKEY, or anything else that restricts the user’s freedom.
The easiest version of linux to use is Linux Mint. linuxmint.com
Mr. Barta, you’re comparing apples and oranges: child porn requires the rape of a child to produce, which is in and of itself a crime(and one that’s rarely committed in isolation – the tape’s the least of the crimes).
Silas: you could make the same argument about child pornography. However, under a libertarian legal system, merely distributing or viewing such material would not be criminal, because it does not violate anyone’s rights. Those in the wrong are the people who produced the material, obviously because they violated the rights of the child.
“Mr. Barta, you’re comparing apples and oranges: child porn requires the rape of a child to produce, which is in and of itself a crime(and one that’s rarely committed in isolation – the tape’s the least of the crimes).”
Rape is not required for child pornography. A simple search on the term “sexting” will prove this. Kids have been charged with child pornography for sending nude photos of themselves. It’s grotesque.
The part of this story that makes me shake my head the most is that Amazon revoked the already purchased copies of the books from their customers. This is the digital equivalent to Amazon breaking into their customer’s homes, taking the infringing, physical copy of the book off the night-stand of the customer and leaving a cash refund in the book’s place. Just because Amazon was able to remotely, digitally remove the book does not make it any less the equivalent to breaking and entering. If a private citizen removed a book from Amazon’s hard-drives, it would be called hacking, and the private citizen would have the book thrown at them.
Only in the realm of the government can two wrongs make a right, and can doing wrong be the necessary and proper course of action.
As a side note, I have long considered one of the gravest errors in the Constitution to be the copyright
and patent clause in Article 1 Section 8. Our founding fathers were very weary of all monopolies; yet they explicitly authorized them. What inconsistency and hypocrisy.
I know I’m 2 years late with this comment, but I just bought their reader, so it has been a time for me to ponder these things. Unfortunately people unwittingly give amazon unrestricted access to their devices by registering them, probably simultaneously “agreeing” to some terms. So I’ve chosen not to open my device to amazon like this.
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