Creepy Amazonia

Well, well, well. Come to find out, your purchases on Amazon's Kindle are not final even after final purchase. I have not made the move to Kindle, and do not have plans to do so, because it seems to provide an essential product -- books -- in what for now at least is a superfluous configuration. But the fact that a number of buyers who purchased and downloaded a copy of George Orwell's 1984 (Irony alert!) discovered that their copy had been erased from their Kindles due to copyright issues. Beyond the fact that such a snafu strikes me as falling in the category of Amazon's problem and not the good faith consumers, it also raises a whole host of issues about privacy, consumer rights, and frankly, just plain creepiness. As one observer points out, "this is ugly for all kinds of reasons."