Amazon and the dystopian future of book censorship
1–10 of 28 posts
Re: Amazon and the dystopian future of book censorship
#2TLDR: Amazon thinks his book has a copyright violation but refuses to reveal the details.
Re: Amazon and the dystopian future of book censorship
#3> The whitepaper was included with the rest of the source code, which was released with the MIT license, see e.g. this archive.
It doesn't? The archive he links to includes a copy of the whitepaper, but this repo is one archivist's collection of files, not an official distribution. The whitepaper is not in the nov08 distribution or the bitcoin-0.1.0.tgz, and the document doesn't include a license statement. I'd believe it's MIT licensed, but this post doesn't establish that fact or sound like he presented more compelling support of the idea to Amazon.
As a practical matter, it's vanishingly unlikely that Satoshi Nakamoto is going to file suit. But as a legal matter, he hasn't shown that the whitepaper was released under a license permitting redistribution or that he has permission from the author. Amazon gave him several options and opportunities, then declined to participate in apparent copyright infringement.
Amazon has a huge problem with people republishing others' books via KDP and their marketplace, even getting fake versions added to or replacing authentic listings. This process seems like it might be a pretty good way of addressing that. The inconvenience comes from not wanting to give the well-practiced scammers a guide to defeating the process, which is a common tradeoff.
Re: Amazon and the dystopian future of book censorship
#4Really no different than a flesh-and-blood editor questioning copyright. This is not the dystopian future you're looking for...
Re: Amazon and the dystopian future of book censorship
#5> The whitepaper was included with the rest of the source code, which was released with the MIT license, see e.g. this archive. It doesn't? The archive he links to includes a copy of the whitepaper, but this repo is one archivist's collection of files, not an official distribution. The whitepaper is not in the nov08 distribution or the bitcoin-0.1.0.tgz, and the document doesn't include a license statement. I'd belie…
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Re: Amazon and the dystopian future of book censorship
#6So in this dystopian future, the OP had to deal with shitty customer service from a discount publisher for a while and then went with a competitor as a result? And the competitor was still able to distribute copies via Amazon?
I'm just not seeing anything remotely like censorship here.
Re: Amazon and the dystopian future of book censorship
#7You decided to self-publish and got what you wanted. If you wanted a real person to take the time to sort it out with you, you should have found a real publisher willing to take you on.
Re: Amazon and the dystopian future of book censorship
#8> Just know that there are other options too. For now.
Author baselessly predicts all other publishers will die out and Amazon will be the only option. Ironically, their article supports the opposite: presumably other publishers will continue to be successful specifically because of issues like this with Amazon KDP.
Not exactly the hard hitting content I expected from the title.
Re: Amazon and the dystopian future of book censorship
#9Really no different than a flesh-and-blood editor questioning copyright. This is not the dystopian future you're looking for...
> no different
Did you read the article? It's absolutely different. An editor would tell you about the work whose copyright you supposedly violated.
Re: Amazon and the dystopian future of book censorship
#10This really another case of someone crying "censorship" when an automated process fails.