Last week, Amazon remotely deleted copies of George Orwell’s 1984 and Animal Farm from users’ Kindles.  As it turns out, the ebook publisher selling the editions didn’t actually own the rights for these works.  As one could imagine, the blogospheric reaction to this event has been a mixture of smirking irony, outrage, confusion, and lots of I-told-you-so.  (See the first link above for an excellent overview of the reaction.)

I had a quick succession of thoughts while reading about the deletions:

• ZOMG!  Jeff Bezos is stealing your stuff!
• Um, you bought an unauthorized ebook from a shady publisher.  Why are you so surprised?
• Wait, how were you supposed to know the publisher was shady?
• Huh, remote deletion wasn’t in the terms of service. But who reads those anyway?
• How can consumers avoid this in the future?

In answer to the question that serves as a title for this post, I see the deletions as all three… Yes, they are a perfect example of why copyright is weird. No, I’m not really surprised (although the level of comic irony is staggering). And the whole thing could prove to be an interesting conversation starter!

At that point my librarian-jutsu kicked in, and I started thinking about how to talk about this nugget of current events goodness with my users (students and faculty).  How can I use this as an opportunity to talk about things like DRM, reading legalese before you buy/agree, copyright terms, applying information literacy beyond books, etc.?  And how can I segue that conversation into a discussion of services provided by librarians and the library?

Have YOU run into any interesting teachable moments lately?  And how did you make the most of them?

[A modified version of this post originally appeared at ArLiSNAP.org]