Seattle - Amazon.com (NASD: AMZN) has been sued by a high school student whose e-book copy of George Orwell’s "1984" — along with all of his digital annotations — were remotely deleted from his Kindle by Amazon after the company realized the e-book had been sold without proper permissions.
The lawsuit was filed last week by a Chicago-based law firm on behalf of seventeen-year-old Justin D. Gawronski.
The suit seeks a court ruling to prevent Amazon from remotely deleting e-books from its customers’ Kindle e-book readers, in addition to unspecified monetary damages.
Gawronski is seeking class action status for the lawsuit.
Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos publicly apologized for the e-book deletion incident on the company’s website, and refunded the purchase price of affected titles.
http://snipurl.com/ommul
(WSJ)
http://snipurl.com/ommqd (TheRegister)
http://snipurl.com/omnbv (DMW previous coverage)
Hi there,
Saw you’d written about the Amazon / 1984 flap, and I thought you might be
interested in the petition we launched yesterday:
http://defectivebydesign.org/amazon1984
We have over 1400 signatures already, and signers include Lawrence Lessig,
Clay Shirky, Cory Doctorow and other notable authors, librarians, and
scholars.
The petition opens:
“We believe in a way of life based on the free exchange of ideas, in which
books have and will continue to play a central role. Devices like Amazon’s
are trying to determine how people will interact with books, but Amazon’s
use of DRM to control and monitor users and their books constitutes a clear
threat to the free exchange of ideas.”
Please have a look, and if you support the cause or think it would be
interesting to your readers, a blog post would be great!
Thanks,
-Holmes Wilson
Free Software Foundation