Oh Amazon. Amazon Web Services stopped hosting the WikiLeaks Cables last week citing that the content was against its Terms of Service.
As first reported on The Next Web, at least one appreciator of irony has now uploaded them to the Kindle store, and you can now buy the otherwise free cables in Amazon Books under the title “WikiLeaks documents expose US foreign policy conspiracies. All cables with tags from 1- 5000.”
From the Amazon blog regarding pulling WikiLeaks from AWS:
“For example, our terms of service state that ‘you represent and warrant that you own or otherwise control all of the rights to the content… that use of the content you supply does not violate this policy and will not cause injury to any person or entity.’ It’s clear that WikiLeaks doesn’t own or otherwise control all the rights to this classified content.”
This is about to get really interesting, as Amazon is now profiting off of content that it has very publicly stated was against its TOS.
Also this is the second Kindle books issue in the past couple of months, as Amazon recently came under controversy for the polarizing “A Pedophile’s Guide,” which eventually got pulled down because of a 10,000 strong Facebook group and mass customer concern.
Judging by some of the comments on the Kindle store page, customers are also not happy with the seeming hypocrisy of allowing the sale of the eBook. Stay tuned for how this will play out.
Update: Amazon representatives explain selling the book because it “contains commentary and analysis regarding recent WikiLeaks disclosures, not the original material disclosed via the WikiLeaks website.”
But as Peter Kafka points out, the WikiLeaks cables are still excerpted within. Hmm.