How Amazon's remote deletion of e-books from the Kindle paves the way for book-banning's digital future. - By Farhad Manjoo - Slate Magazine:

Last week a few Kindle owners awoke to discover that the company had reached into their devices and remotely removed copies of George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm.
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Someone uploaded bootlegged copies using the Kindle Store's self-publishing system, and Amazon was only trying to look after publishers' intellectual property. The Orwell incident was too rich with irony to escape criticism, however.
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The worst thing about this story isn't Amazon's conduct; it's the company's technical capabilities. ... As our media libraries get converted to 1's and 0's, we are at risk of losing what we take for granted today: full ownership of our book and music and movie collections.


This is one reason I've liked Apple's stance of putting zeroes and ones in your pocket, even if they're DRM'd. I've been POed more than once when my iBook has refused to play Between the Buttons because I wasn't connected to the iTMS, but there are enough apps out there that can removed the DRM that I'm not quite so worried.

And in any event, I was able to back the things up. What this argues against is buying items to run on a closed box like the Kindle. I don't see eReader being able to do the same thing, eg.