The New York Times reported today that Amazon has changed its mind yet again about deleting Kindle copies of Orwell works, due to it lacking the rights to them. Amazon is now offering affected customers a free upload of a different, legally authorized edition–and with any annotations the customers made on their old versions. This solution may make the Gawronski lawsuit moot. But more importantly, it’s turned the Kindle Orwell debacle into yet another question about who really “owns” data. Those annotations may or may not have value quantifiable as damages, but at the end of the day, it still appears to be Amazon who decides when and where you get access to them.
