Taking Amazon at their word ...

Amazon.com's spokesperson says (as reported by the Wall Street Journal) that the company's reasons for booting Wikileaks from its servers were half ideological, half just plain false, and not due to pressure from the US government:

It was "inaccurate" to claim that pressure from the U.S. government or large-scale attacks by hackers caused the company to discontinue its service of WikiLeaks, said Amazon spokesman Drew Herdener in a statement ...

The false part:

WikiLeaks "doesn't own or otherwise control all the rights to this classified content," one of the stipulations of Amazon's contractual terms, he said.

There are no "intellectual property" implications here. US government documents aren't protected by copyright. Whether "nobody" owns them or "everybody" owns them is an interesting question, but what's absolutely certain is that Wikileaks is not violating any "intellectual property" rights by making them available. Herdener is, at the very least, prevaricating wildly there.

The ideological part:

Mr. Herdener said that Amazon's terms of service also require that content "will not cause injury to any person or entity." Yet he said "it is not credible that the extraordinary volume of 250,000 classified documents that WikiLeaks is publishing could have been carefully redacted in such a way as to ensure that they weren't putting innocent people in jeopardy.

So the spokesperson for the largest bookstore on earth publicly claims that words are dangerous and can hurt people and that Amazon wants nothing to do with words like that. Chalk up a new high for cognitive dissononance.

And for hypocrisy -- as of a few minutes ago, Amazon is still selling The Communist Manifesto, Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-Tung, Mein Kampf, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and In Praise of Public Life: The Honor And Purpose Of Political Service.

If words really are dangerous and really can hurt people, well, each of the aforementioned books can be plausibly linked to more deaths than the entire Wikileaks ouvre has been so far.

So much for Amazon being the "victim," as some opponents of a boycott -- at least one of whom for some reason felt the need to email me with an invitation to go fuck myself for even temporarily dissociating myself from Amazon while I awaited their explanation -- have claimed.

So far as I'm concerned, my negative social and economic preferencing of Amazon has now transitioned from temporary to permanent: I just don't care to do business with the company any more. Your mileage may vary, and that's fine. You can even bust my balls about it if it makes you feel better.

If anyone wants to do something techy to support dissociation by Amazon affiliates, some Blogger and WordPress scripts for removing/replacing Amazon links in an automated manner would be really cool. That's a task I'm not looking forward to doing manually.

Please Don't Feed the Amazon

Amazon.com has apparently booted Wikileaks off of its hosting services. Antiwar.com is calling for a boycott of Amazon.

As I've mentioned before, I'm a long-time Amazon customer (pretty much since they started) and an affiliate. I'm not a big customer, but I've been pretty loyal. I'm not a big affiliate, but since I've made a little money from them, they've presumably made a little money on me.

Earlier this morning I:

- Notified Amazon that until I see an explanation from them, I'm taking my shopping elsewhere (hint: It's Christmas shopping season, which probably accounts for the bulk of my Amazon purchases each year); and that unless that explanation is damn good and pretty quick in arriving, I'll permanently dissociate myself from them as both a customer and an affiliate.

- Donated €3,50 (a little under US$5) to Wikileaks in lieu of a $3.99 Kindle purchase I'd been planning to make (I recently downloaded the Kindle app to the kids' Windoze machine, have downloaded some free books and purchased a couple, and was about to give it a favorable review).

On the off chance that Amazon will come back with a believable "wait a minute guys, it's not like that at all," I'm not going to start the arduous task of combing through a hundred thousand posts or so (close to 1,700 here at KN@PPSTER, 90,000+ at Rational Review, etc.) and removing Amazon links just yet. But please, don't click on Amazon links here, and don't buy from Amazon, at least for now.

Speaking of all this, my latest piece at C4SS is about the Wikileaks "diplomatic cables" saga. Check it out.