You have to admit that there's some strange irony in the fact that out of all of the books that Amazon.com could have deleted from people's Kindles, it happens to be 1984.
Amazon realized that pirated electronic versions of George Orwell's dystopian novel had been downloaded onto people's portable e-reading devices. The company deleted the files without giving prior notice to customers.
The latest twist in the tale is that a class-action lawsuit was filed against Amazon on July 30.
Among the plaintiffs is Justin D. Gawronski, a 17-year-old high school student who was reading the novel on his Kindle and taking notes for his class.
It's another strange irony that a teenager sues a corporation for deleting something he had downloaded legally during a time when other corporations can go after teenagers (among others) for downloading media illegally.
I got my first real look at a Kindle just a few months ago in a new media class, and I'm not completely sold on its appeal. Sure, you can have access to hundreds, even thousands, of books, newspapers, and blogs at your fingertips, downloaded onto your portable device in mere seconds, but I guess I'm so use to other portable items: you know, actual books and newspapers that look, sound, feel, and smell like actual paper (and probably taste like actual paper, too, but I wouldn't know).
Also in that new media class, I was introduced to the online video "EPIC 2014," which happens to feature Amazon and also alludes to 1984 with the name on the ID card, as shown in the screencap above. While this video (part fact but dives into fiction in the 2005 portion and beyond) focuses more on journalism and Web 2.0, it does touch on issues related to copyright and privacy.
It's pretty amazing, but kind of scary what this video and this Kindle incident could suggest about how invasive others can be in people's lives in this technological day and age. While piracy is definitely an important issue, what about a similarly-spelled word with a totally different, but perhaps even more important, meaning: privacy?
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