During the night of July 16th, while Amazon Kindle owners slept, Amazon was quietly deleting their copies of George Orwell's 1984 and Animal Farm.

The FSF and Defective By Design, which on Monday called on activists to post reviews calling attention to the Kindle Swindle's arbitrary deletion of George Orwell ebooks from hundreds of users' devices, welcomed Bezos's apology, but said more must be done to remedy the problems exposed by Amazon's actions.

The Free Software Foundation's DefectiveByDesign.org campaign, in cooperation with prominent authors, journalists, and librarians, has launched a petition against the Amazon Kindle's use of digital restrictions management (DRM).

Late last week, Amazon deleted purchased copies of George Orwell's 1984 and Animal Farm from the ebook readers of hundreds of users. They were able to do this because of proprietary software and Digital Restrictions Management. Amazon doesn't say anything about DRM on the Kindle's page, so it's up to us to write reviews to let people know about it.

"The Amazon kindle provides convenience, but at the cost of freedom. When you purchase a kindle, you must agree to use the Digital Restriction Management (DRM) system. Since all of the Kindle ebooks you purchase from Amazon are in their proprietary DRM format, you are also promising to not share them with friends. And, because you promise to not circumvent the DRM, there is no way to move them to another device or a computer. You are locked into the Kindle and you are locked into Amazon. If you try to move them to a new ebook reader or a computer, Amazon can end your service and remove access to the books you have already purchased..."

via http://www.defectivebydesign.org/node/1096 (instructions on tagging - Kindle Swindle )

"The Free Software Foundation's Defective By Design campaign just added the Amazon Kindle to its list of DRM-related offenders. The organization started a petition against Amazon for restricting readers' access to their own books and effectively discouraging reading options..."

It was unfortunately reported yesterday by a number of sources that Amazon had released the source code for the software running on the Kindle DX.
This isn’t all of the Kindle source code. It’s a selection released in order to comply with the license requirements of the code originally written by other people (like the GNU Project) which Amazon modified for its own purposes.

This morning, hundreds of Amazon Kindle owners awoke to discover that books by a certain famous author had mysteriously disappeared from their e-book readers. These were books that they had bought and paid for - thought they owned.

Inspired by Seinfeld, DefectiveByDesign is "impeaching" Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, asking him to drop DRM on the Kindle.