Paging Big Brother: In Amazon's Bookstore, Orwell Gets a Rewrite (nytimes.com) 43
As fake and illegitimate texts proliferate online, books are becoming a form of misinformation. The author of "1984" would not be surprised. From a report: In George Orwell's "1984," the classics of literature are rewritten into Newspeak, a revision and reduction of the language meant to make bad thoughts literally unthinkable. "It's a beautiful thing, the destruction of words," one true believer exults. Now some of the writer's own words are getting reworked in Amazon's vast virtual bookstore, a place where copyright laws hold remarkably little sway. Orwell's reputation may be secure, but his sentences are not. Over the last few weeks I got a close-up view of this process when I bought a dozen fake and illegitimate Orwell books from Amazon. Some of them were printed in India, where the writer is in the public domain, and sold to me in the United States, where he is under copyright. Others were straightforward counterfeits, like the edition of his memoir "Down and Out in Paris and London" that was edited for high school students. The author's estate said it did not give permission for the book, printed by Amazon's self-publishing subsidiary. Some counterfeiters are going as far as to claim Orwell's classics as their own property, copyrighting them with their own names.
Can't be that bad... (Score:5, Funny)
I remember reading A Tale of Two Cities from these vendors...
It was the best of times, call me Ishmael. Happy families are all alike; my brother Jem got his arm badly broken at the elbow.
Go ahead, ask me how Huck Finn gets away from Kurtz in the final showdown between Lennie Small and Big Brother.
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And the light-saber battle in Wuthering Heights was kick-ass!
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AioKits reminisced:
I remember reading A Tale of Two Cities from these vendors...
It was the best of times, call me Ishmael. Happy families are all alike; my brother Jem got his arm badly broken at the elbow.
Go ahead, ask me how Huck Finn gets away from Kurtz in the final showdown between Lennie Small and Big Brother.
Which prompted Brett Buck to enthuse
And the light-saber battle in Wuthering Heights was kick-ass!
Which leads me to point out that there is a reasonably-big-buget movie (whose stars include Lena Headey, Charles Dance, Suki Waterhouse, and other familiar faces) called Pride and Prejudice and Zombies [imdb.com] that sets Pride and Prejudice in the middle of a zombie pandemic.
For a Jane Austen-penned periold-drama send-up (with zombies), it's actually pretty good. There's plenty of hand-to-hand zombie asskicking sequences, with each of the major characters gettin
Definitive Take (Score:2)
Passion of the Christ 2:Crucify THIS!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
Paywall! (Score:2)
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Troll (Score:4, Interesting)
What's the author's point? That Orwell being in the public domain in India is a bad thing? No, it's a good thing. The public domain lets people edit, revise, reuse, whatever they want to make new works. That's a good thing. But somehow we're supposed to equate it with Big Brother and Orwellian thought control?
Of course, there are still things you aren't allowed to do. You can't claim a copyright on a public domain work written by someone else. That's just fraud. But big publishers do that all the time [wikipedia.org] and earn huge profits from it. If we're going to start enforcing laws against copyfraud, there are more important places to start than some random person self publishing 1984 on Amazon under their own name.
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Also, the Mona Lisa would look a lot better with eyebrows, so let's grab a sharpie...
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Re:Troll (Score:4, Insightful)
That Orwell being in the public domain in India is a bad thing?
Orwell isn't in the public domain. "The writer" is a person who isn't copyrighted. The work "1984" appears to be in the public domain in India. In much of the rest of the world, the Orwell estate holds the copyright.
I think the only point we can take from this story is that some people will sell counterfeit things through Amazon. Is this news? Is the point that some people aren't smart enough to know that "1984" wasn't written by Manjunath Kiriwangitanithong and copyright by him? Is THAT news, either?
Re:Troll (Score:5, Interesting)
I think the point was that Amazon is quite willing to sell fake versions of famous books. If you can't trust their original business, just think how untrustworthy the rest of it must be.
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I think the point was that Amazon is quite willing to sell fake versions of famous books.
Amazon is willing to sell what people want to sell on Amazon. Once they opened the doors to outside vendors, they opened the doors to fakes. Just as you can buy knock-off books from other websites.
If you can't trust their original business,
Their original business was Amazon selling books sourced by Amazon.
just think how untrustworthy the rest of it must be.
If you still have any doubt then you simply haven't been paying attention. Knock-offs and fakes are an issue for a lot of sites, not just Amazon. I actually find some of them quite handy. The knock-off Arduino Nano is about $4 each; the real thin
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Many years ago, I bought a 2 GB thumbdrive/MP3 player combo which I used to back up some of my data. Everything was fine at first, but then I noticed that as I got past the 1GB mark, I was experiencing read errors, and some of the filenames had turned to garbage characters. I then decided to format the drive. Turns out the so called "2GB" drive was really a 1GB that was falsely formatted to appear as a 2GB to whatever system it was plugged into.
This was a drive bought at a brick+mortar store, but i
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The public domain lets people edit, revise, reuse, whatever they want to make new works.
Are you a fucking idiot?
These books are edited, revised etc and then sold as the original.
That's a good thing.
No, no it isn't.
Libertarians ain't need no stinkin' copyrights! (Score:1)
I'm working on "Clockwork Orangeman".
Re: Libertarians ain't need no stinkin' copyrights (Score:2)
George Orwell has been dead since 1950 (Score:3)
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Re:George Orwell has been dead since 1950 (Score:4, Informative)
As for the motivations for such a long copyright term, it's not so much to encourage him to write more stories... but rather to encourage/force other authors to create new original works instead of reusing old works (or so the theory goes).
(While that justification was probably BS at the time, it's starting to make a bit more sense: imagine the remake/reboot tear that Hollywood is currently on if having to buy/hold the rights wasn't an issue... )
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Just relax, have a bottle of rum, and listen to the sea. Yo-ho-ho
Public Domain (Score:3)
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Re: Public Domain (Score:3)
Re:Public Domain (Score:4, Insightful)
What if someone wanted to read the unadulterated, unedited version of 1984? How can someone be assured that they are getting a pure copy?
By either doing the research yourself to assure that the copy you are reading is unedited; or by paying someone reputable to do it for you.
Exactly the same as any work which is in the public domain. There's nothing special about 1984.
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but there is something special on how everyone misinterprets it.
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Library of congress, or other sources.
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What if someone wanted to read the unadulterated, unedited version of 1984? How can someone be assured that they are getting a pure copy?
Many people collect first editions. My copy of 1984 was printed in 1949.
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All Orwell's work should be in the public domain everywhere by now. If it's not, then that's the problem.
Well most countries these days operate the "life + 70 years" model. So on that basis George Orwell's [wikipedia.org] work will become public domain in January 2020 (i.e. in about 5 months from now).
Very disappointing (Score:2)
No-one to date seems to have turned 1984 into a steamy romance novel. Maybe after the copyright expires in the U.S.
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if you're a voyeur or exhibitionist it already is
A Long Time Ago In A Galaxy Far Away... (Score:4, Funny)
Lived a Cat In A Hat.....
The fact that (Score:5, Informative)
His works(or any older the 20 years) aren't in the public domain everywhere is pathetic and nothing more the corporation trying to control out culture.
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This was what I got out of the story. The author completely misinterprets the problem here. The Micky Mouse Protection Acts strike again.
I imagine that next the author will complain about how the estate of Jane Austin isn't receiving any royalties from Pride and Prejudice and Zombies.
Unfortunately, this is not an issue many people know or care about.
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Amazon makes it easy (Score:3)
Amazon makes it VERY easy to do this with kindle books, and makes it difficult to report to get it fixed.
A while ago I did a search for Ray Bradbury and the results included some college student's essay about a Ray Bradbury book - allegedly written by Ray Bradbury (he was the "author"). The title made it somewhat obvious it was not the actual book, but if you weren't looking closely you could be duped, and the numerous negative comments showed that many had been. I searched for the essay author and there were other entries loaded in the same way.
I contacted Amazon and it took two days to get them to even realize what I was saying, they kept treating me as a self-published author who needed help fixing the entry. Once I escalated twice I eventually found someone who could do something, and it did eventually get removed.
Wait a minute (Score:1)
Are you saying that the Sorny portable CD player and Magnetbox TV I ordered from Amazon might be counterfeit products?
At least I still know a genuine Panaphonics when I see one!
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Funny, I remember seeing those "brands" at "Big Lots" / "Odd Lots" stores in the late 80s. You just can't find Sorny quality anymore.
exaggerated article? (Score:2)
Let Them Be Public Domain, But Public Beware (Score:1)
plagiarism and defamation (Score:2)
We already have a solution for this: plagiarism and defamation.
The world's institutions of higher learning merely need to band together and strip every person in these publishing mills (who dare to put their own face on other people's words) of any higher educational attainments they've ever received.
They certainly do as much to the hapless undergraduate who cribs so much as one substantive sentence from an unacknowledged source.
This should extend all the way to any famous person supplying so much as a blur