The Amazon Police

So everybody has heard of the recent Amazon.com recent actions with respect of those allegedly 'pirated' copies of a couple of George Orwell's books on the Kindle. Well, they deleted them remotely. It must be noted that customers actually bought these books through the Amazon store, but apparently there had been a confusion regarding the copyright status of those copies, so Amazon decided to silently delete remotely those books from their customers' Kindle devices and refund them.

There are many things that I see that are wrong with this, and it turns out, Amazon itself agrees with me. What I can't believe is how a few bloggers and news sites I guess, went on to post pieces on how this was all OK, Amazon was in its right to do it, and everybody should shut up about it. In fact, they went as far as suggesting that it was actually commendable, and Amazon had to do it. My favorite argument was that of comparing Amazon with the police... yeah, that's right. The Amazon goes something like if you had something that was stolen, then the natural expected action from the police was to come into your house and snatch it from you. I don't think that, for the intelligent reader, I don't have to go on and explain all the different levels where this argument is horribly wrong, but I'd just like to point out a few things:

• First off, Amazon is not the police!!! I am sure it is perfectly within Kindle's TOS to do what they did, but to suggest this was some sort of policing action is preposterous! I mean, is that what we want? Private companies policing private citizens?
• Even in light of the argument above, Police itself doesn't have the right (yet) to come into your house, unannounced, without any court order, just to check whether you have anything stolen... which is pretty much what Amazon is doing.

I don't know about Kindle owners, but if I had one of those things, I'd be pretty uncomfortable knowing that Amazon can come anytime into my device and do whatever they want with the files currently stored there. No, it was not right for Amazon to do that! And they have recognized the bad image all this incident gave them, which is why they apologized and vowed to do it no more. I was very worried that this would set a trend for other companies to think this was OK, with the way technology is advancing, and everything moving to 'the cloud'. As it is, it seems to have set a precedent that this is unacceptable (for now), which makes me feel better.

No, it was not OK for Amazon to delete those files! And NO! Amazon is not the police!