What Is Ownership? Privacy?

Copyright laws, until they expire, represent a legal mechanism whereby the originator of a product, or a name, or a talent, is able to protect that original idea, through patent, from being adopted by unauthorized individuals or companies, wishing to take advantage of the product, or name, to their own benefit. This assurance of copyright protection is an integral part of the capitalist system.

Still, people will always seek to flout the law, with such ephemeral ideas of ownership of something that can be accessed easily and used without paying 'dues' to the copyrighted owners of the product. So-called piracy of intellectual, or almost-fungible items will always be popular with people who believe it's nonsense, not illegal, to access for themselves that which the legal owners put a steep price on.

It recently came to light that Amazon, with its proprietary rights over the Kindle, made hash of its own promise in a quasi-legal document of assurance to its clients. Amazon books unleashed the Kindle on the buying public as a neat, new way to carry a library with them. It's a proprietary system whereby, through Amazon, Kindle owners can purchase texts to download on their nifty little e-library.

But when Amazon thought it had run amok of copyright, even though the literary texts in question had lost copyright protection through expiration, it invaded the privacy of Kindle owners by accessing their digital libraries, e-copied onto their private devices, to electronically erase books by George Orwell. In effect, validating, by this proprietary intervention, the dire warning contained in Orwell's 1984.

They did this, to avoid potential sanctions from copyright owners. And they did this despite the fact that the end-user license for Kindle states that you "purchase" an e-book through their system, and it becomes yours. Quite reminiscent of what Microsoft pioneered, in fact, in protecting copyright ownership of their world-famous software. Pirated copies of Microsoft software proliferated, to the agony of the company.

This is a giant corporation like few others in the world, as a monumental money-making enterprise. Yet the governing body of this corporation set about hounding consumers, insisting that illegal copies of their software represented criminal fraud. Microsoft hit back electronically by infiltrating the privacy of individuals' and companies' systems to warn, and then freeze their systems with an intolerable interference which could not be eradicated other than by legal purchase of their product.

Criminalizing people regardless of whether or not they had deliberately taken it upon themselves to take advantage of illegal possession of their product through sharing, and accessing without payment. Passing judgement, declaring guilt of the criminal infraction of violating their sacrosanct copyright. Hindering the corporation's full and total grasp on accumulating ever great wealth, ad infinitum.