Last week, Amazon got in some hot water when they remotely deleted ebooks from customers’ Kindles without permission or explanation. From civilian interaction with Amazon customer service, it was unclear whether Amazon remote-killed the books because they were sold by non-copyright holders (pirates) or because a legitimate publisher “decide[d] to pull their content from the Kindle store.”
Information Week (via) has since confirmed that piracy was the reason for Amazon’s creepy move:
Amazon says that that the books in question were added to its catalog using the company’s self-service platform by a third-party who did not have the rights to the books.
When the story broke last week, I guessed that Amazon wouldn’t apologize or reinstate the books in question if piracy was the culprit, and indeed they’ve done neither. They did, however, give this sinister sound bite:
