And you thought taxified Harry Potter titles were an unholy nerd alliance? As it turns out (from SMH) Amazon, who sell the Kindle and the e-books that are read on it, made a booboo. It turns out that they were selling books by George Orwell (like 1984), but after they were sold and downloaded to individuals' Kindle, it turned out they didn't have the rights to do so, and Amazon apparently snuck in, and deleted the e-books from everyone's Kindles and refunded the money, without decent notification.
Enter MAKE, a print and online magazine dedicated to DIY and lots of cool nerd stuff like electronics. For example, there are LOTS of Wiimote hacks on Make. KipKay, a popular online DIYer regularly makes videos for MAKE. Very cool - for example:
Anyway, it seems MAKE have published (through their blog) a "workaround" in order to get the Orwellian books back on the Kindle. "How?" you ask? One word, "copyright". In Australia, Orwell's books have entered the Public Domain because copyright in Australia (for literary works anyway) is life of author plus 50 years. In the US (where Amazon wasn't allowed to sell the books) the term is life of author plus 70 years. Nothing quite like a bit of copyright arbitrage. Of course, you actually HAVE to be in Australia to download the book (from an Aussie Uni site). A US resident will probably still be infringing copyright if they carry out the workaround unless they're in Australia.
Read the MAKE "workaround" here.
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