My take on the Amazon Kindle fiasco

There have been several articles on Amazon.com's rather questionable removal of two novels from Kindle distribution: George Orwell's 1984 and Animal Farm. This has been covered by everyone from the New York Times, CNet News, TechDirt, All Things Digital, Ars Technica, and BoingBoing. But my point here is not to cross-reference the news.

One alternative that does strike me as having been feasible, was for Amazon to have paid the licensing fees to the copyright owner (because it's all about money, after all), then sue the errant publisher for breach of contract to recoup some of their costs. But whatever they could have done, they should have left their customers alone. This, it seems, would ultimately have been the least costly solution. And of course I define "cost" as more than the money.

But while we're talking about the Kindle, I noticed a comment on TechDirt that said something to the effect that the Kindle costs more than a netbook and is arguably less flexible. One thing is certain, though, what you do with the Kindle isn't all up to you. Not even a little bit. Amazon has never seemed evil, to me, but they're no different than any other large company: their customers are always the last ones in the food chain to get benefit. Let me suggest they should work on changing that.

This thing is a major public relations nightmare for them, but despite the irony of the pulled title (does the term "Big Brother" mean anything to you?), it won't mean a damn thing in the current "war" over copyright. Some proponents still like to argue that the copyright owner gets to decide all use of a work, and that this was theft, while most of us do think that as consumers of creative works, we still do get to decide how we will use or not use the work.

Everything created today is derivative, based on something done by someone else, also derivative. Where do we draw the line? Who deserves to be paid? How much? For how long? It's all about the money, but the real danger is not in not being paid enough, it's in not being noticed enough.