Today, Amazon said its decision earlier this year to remotely delete copies of the George Orwell novels Nineteen Eighty Four and Animal Farm from its Kindle e-book readers was wrong.

Affected customers have been offered the choice of getting their e-books redelivered to their Kindle, or receive a $US30 voucher.

In June, Amazon - via the Kindle’s cellular connection - reached out and remotely deleted copies of several novels downloaded by users of its e-book reader, including - without any irony - Nineteen Eighty Four. A month earlier, illegitimate copies of the Ayn Rand novels Atlas Shrugged, The Fountainhead, and The Virtue of Selfishness were also zapped.

The e-tailer said it had thought, incorrectly, that the titles were copyright expired and in the public domain.

"Our 'solution' to the problem was stupid, thoughtless and painfully out of line with our principles. It is wholly self-inflicted, and we deserve the criticism we’ve received," said chief executive Jeff Bezos in an earlier statement.

But despite the mea culpa over the Orwellian fashion it deleted the Orwell books, Amazon’s action taken in part to dodge a lawsuit from two customers, and the attendant negative publicity. The suit equated the remote deletion to Amazon busting into people’s homes to retrieve hard copy books.

However, although the lawsuit was horrid PR for Amazon, it was legally baseless: for the e-tailer doesn’t strictly speaking, actually sell e-books in the first place. Rather, it licenses them - controversial fine print that Mr Bezos has yet to address.

Martin Taylor, director of the Auckland-based Digital Publishing Forum and principle at Addenda Publishing, explained the legal set-up for NBR’s Aug 28 print edition:

There’s a legal principle referred to as exhaustion of rights, or the more descriptive American term, the First Sale Doctrine. This states that a copyright holder can’t control the future sale or distribution of a legal copy once ownership passes on ...

In an attempt to circumvent this legal principle, Amazon’s terms of sale state that an ebook is licensed rather than sold outright. This has been common practice with software, for instance, but it’s early days with ebooks and not entirely clear whether they will be able to use this legal device to control post-sale use.

Personally, I think Amazon and publishers should be able to limit use and transfer of ebooks. And caution is understandable when many legal issues with big long term consequences are still unclear. But part of Amazon’s problem here — legal as well as public relations — is that it’s creating the appearance that its ebooks are sold outright rather than on some sort of royalty-free license-to-use basis. This creates expectations with buyers that don’t necessarily line up with the sellers’ intentions.