Glenn's Gleanings

Patti and I have been joshing each other back and forth about our potential lust for the Amazon Kindle (a digital book reader). I especially like the latest version that allows one to read the newspapers while eating my breakfast cereal. However, there has been some recent controversy (click on this blog entry title for a different NY Times column about the controversy) about Amazon censoring the Kindle by removing two of George Orwell's novels, most notably 1984 (anybody remember the Apple ad, only shown one time on national tv during the 1984 Super Bowl, announcing the Mac?)

Ah, but in further reading there is much more to the (NYTimes) story. Allow me to make a parallelism (is that right?). Suppose you wrote, sang, and owned the copyright to the "Top 40" hit, "Patti's Love Song" and were counting the pennies coming in for your long desired retirement and somebody illegally uploaded it into iTunes and now it was all over the country on everybody's ipod and you weren't getting a dime. Apple creates a software app, so that the next time the person syncs their ipod on iTunes, the song is automatically deleted to protect your copyrights and diligently earned pennies. Is that censorship or proper protection of copyright laws?

The two Orwell books are under copyright in the US (but not in other countries) and Amazon has no permission to sell those two books without paying the appropriate fees. A third party, hacked into the Kindle program and added those two books (from pages copied on a copier). Amazon, I believe rightly so, in an effort to protect the persons who own the copyrights to those two books in the US, deleted them.

It could also be like the local public library, finding out that someone photocopied a library book, and was distributed them to patrons in the library. Couldn't the library remove those photo copies without it being considered censorship? Now the parallelism falls apart if Amazon refuses to allow those books to be added to a Kindle (assuming that Amazon buys the rights to do so) because they (Amazon) doesn't like the content of the books?

A closer reading of the issue at hand is called for in this case.

We all know the story of the Good Samaritan, but I always seem to forget that it was a lawyer that quizzed Jesus, asking "And who is my neighbor?" Eugene Peterson in The Message, says he was "looking for a loophole in the law." I also always seem to forget that in that day, the Samaritans were some of the most hated and despised folks in their culture (who are our "most hated folks"?) Our friend, Catt shared on Facebook a video from a social justice organization here in the Tampa Bay area (Community Tampa Bay) that certainly garners a second look by me (and maybe by some of you) (or another group in your own community wherever that might be). Thanks Catt! Keep those prophetic links a-comin' Take a look: