Do Bits Respect International Boundaries?

Last week, some users of the Amazon Kindle reader got a nasty surprise. If they had purchased either Orwell's Animal Farm or 1984, Amazon had deleted it from their Kindle and (how considerate) refunded the purchase price to the user's account. Kindle users may not have read the fine print that allows Amazon to do that, but it still applies nonetheless.As much as people are making Amazon out to be the bad guy here, it's not all their fault. Instead, look to the stupidity of American intellectual property laws. Copyrights were intended to protect writers so that they could make a living from what they created. Orwell died in January 1950, more than 59 years ago. Until 1998, American copyright law protected works for 50 years after the death of the author, which meant that Orwell's works would have moved into the public domain in 2000. However, at the 11th hour that changed.

In 1998 the late Congressman Sonny Bono championed a bill that extended copyrights for another 20 years, for a total of 70 years for persons and 95 years for corporations. The European Union had already extended copyrights in 1993, and the move in the USA was ostensibly to move into line with Europe but widely seen to be protecting large corporations such as Disney -- which happened to be in Bono's district. Several early Disney works had copyrights that were on the verge of expiration.

As a result of these recent changes to copyright laws, Orwell's works are still under copyright protection in both the USA and Europe. However, they are already in the public domain in several other countries, including Canada and Australia, where the 50-year term still applies. Amazon operates mainly in the USA, though; if it wants to stay out of legal hot water it needs to follow the law in the countries where it operates. That's how it got into the mess it did last week. Was it really necessary to delete the books, rather than just stop selling them? That's a debate I'll save for another day.

Amazon could make a case for continuing to provide these books to customers in countries where they are already in the public domain, but no doubt the lawyers would revel in filing court cases that argued these were copyrighted American bits and not public-domain Canadian bits. On the other hand, could a Canadian company export its public-domain bit copies of Orwell's works to the USA, if the "copy" was made legally in Canada? These kinds of questions seem almost bizarre, but on the other hand no more bizarre than a company remotely deleting a copy of Orwell's 1984 to satisfy a federal law.