If you are a george orwell fan you may have noticed a few books missing from your Kindle last week …

It seems that someone had uploaded copies of the books to Amazon’s Self Service Publishing service which we reviewed last week and tried to sell them under their account.

As of now we don’t know if that third party had any ownership rights or if they were just trying to profit off of stolen copyrighted material but Amazon’s actions if you believe them seem to be honest.

Basically it was like someone trying to sell software from an illegal download site and the hosting company turning off their account BUT where Amazons actions went a little deeper was when they gave no notice and just removed the books from people’s devices.

Its a little scary….  but we have seen this before.

Software publishers that track the installs of pirated software on users systems doing remote audits without the end users knowledge. You go to the companies website and download a plugin for a stolen piece of software and the plugin tells the company you have a bad or stolen copy of their software. Unfortunately the user does not take the time to read the install notices.

Anyway this does have meaning and for now Amazon has agreed that they won’t do this again in the future.

In the end if the books were distributed without proper rights the Kindle owners would be in possession of stolen materials that would open them and Amazon up to a storm of prosecution.

So its probably better that they did it.