The twitterverse has been abuzz with talk of Amazon’s decision to delete Orwell’s 1984 and Animal Farm from its proprietary e-reader, Kindle. As a consequence, Kindle owners woke up on Friday to discover that those two titles had disappeared and the purchase price had been credited to their accounts. It turns out Amazon is not licensed to distribute Orwell’s works in digital format and acceded to the copyright holder’s request to delete them from user accounts.
There have been a couple responses doing the rounds without any serious examination. The first is a sense of violation amongst Kindle owners. People are making a dubious comparison to the scenario in which a person buys a book from Barnes & Noble and wakes up one morning to discover that while he was sleeping, a clerk from the store entered his house, took back the book, and left a refund on his night table. The second response can be reduced to three words: “Of all books!” People feel a Big Brotherish chill down the spine as they realize how much personal privacy they have relinquished. Both responses are unwarranted.
This is a uniquely American fiasco. The most obvious reason for this assertion is that Kindle is available only in the U.S. Because Kindle is tied to wireless networks, Amazon.com can easily restrict the geographic reach of the Kindle’s functionality. In other words, I could hop across the border and bring one home, but I wouldn’t be able to buy any titles for it. Nevertheless, my Canadian Kindle envy has suddenly transformed into gratitude. I thank my American cousins for serving as guinea pigs while American publishers and booksellers carry out their first — and decidedly inept — experiments in the laboratory of digital media.
But the responses I mentioned above are also uniquely American. This sense of violation, this comparison to a break and enter, is tied to a uniquely American rights-based philosophy of copyright law. To Americans I say: for this sense of violation, you have only yourselves to blame. If you hadn’t treated culture as a commodity in the first instance, nothing could have been taken from you. In 1998, when president Clinton ratified the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, you sat by and did nothing. When, at the same time, Congressman Sonny Bono sponsored the Copyright Term Extension Act, you sat by and did nothing. Now, we witness the deep irony that America is the only country in the world where 1984 and Animal Farm are not in the public domain. It is a deep irony, too, that these two books have become required reading for our youth as a means of instilling in them the values associated with a functioning democracy. Only in America, it seems, is the commodification of culture rendered an essential component of these values.
This brings me to the second response: the comparison of Amazon to Big Brother. The comparison doesn’t work because Amazon isn’t government. Amazon is big media. It is the genius of America that it has privatized even the tools of its public discourse. The consequence is that when private interests manipulate those tools in ways that undermine public discourse, there’s not a lot its citizens can do.
America is not a democracy; it’s a constitutional democracy. At least that’s the theory. As the shopworn argument goes: there’s a statement of fundamental values which protects private individuals from a (public) tyranny of the majority. In other words, the constitution protects people from malicious governmental action. But what happens when government divests itself of its responsibilities by selling off its organs to private interests? What recourse do inmates have against abuses in megajails run by private security firms? What do patients do when their HMO won’t fund necessary treatments? What do homeowners do when waste disposal contractors poison the local water supply?
More to the point: what do people do when a government divests itself of any role in shaping its nation’s culture? And let’s be honest. The push to privatize is what lies behind the Copyright Term Extension Act. I expect that one day, in a fit of insanity, the U.S. Congress will ram through a bill that grants copyright in perpetuity.
What amazes me is that there are many American citizens who divest themselves of their citizenship by internalizing the rationales for their own subjugation. The so-called Tea Party protests are a good example. A group of mostly lower/middle class citizens have been complaining that Americans are being “taxed to death.” In fact, the United States has the lowest marginal tax rate in the developed world. (A consequence is that U.S. tax freedom day was on April 13th this year whereas Canada’s fell on June 6th.) In the United States, the problem isn’t taxation so much as distribution of wealth. In 2006, the average CEO in the United States earned 364 times the pay of the average worker. No other country has such a marked disparity of wealth. A more progressive taxation scheme would leave most Tea Party protesters unaffected. Yet most persist in labeling these schemes “socialist,” preferring their ideological purity to the benefits of an improved standard of living.
I call this the lottery ticket ideology, something Orwell presented in 1984. The proles buy lottery tickets (a form of regressive taxation) because they have internalized the belief that, one day, they too will rise above their circumstances and enjoy a privileged status. Just like anybody can be the president. Just like everybody has a shot at earning that fat CEO compensation. The Copyright Term Extension Act plays on that lottery ticket ideology. Although few books remain in print for more than a couple years (see Lawrence Lessig’s Free Culture), authors blithely ignore the cultural consequences and endorse such legislation because they think about their books the way they think about their lottery tickets — as a shot at the big times.
Let’s be blunt: Amazon.com is not Big Brother. The Big Brother comparison is an irrelevant distraction. Since people started flaming Kindle, Amazon.com has acted with transparency. It automatically refunded money. And it is not misusing personal information. More attention should be directed at the copyright holder of Orwell’s books and at the legislative regime that has privatized a part of our collective heritage. 99 cents to a few thousand readers? Small potatoes. If you want something to get worked up about, how about a trillion dollars of public funds to prop up a corrupt (and private) financial services industry? That’s your lottery money paying for all those Wall Street bonuses.