Regardless of the legality of deleting the 1984 ebook, it's ridiculous to assert that Amazon should be able to destroy anyone's annotations for any reason. Those annotations belong to the user who created them.
I don't really understand what you mean when you say "semantics aside". Are you intentionally saying something that is equivalent to "Ignoring the meaning of 'intellectual property' and 'physical property', intellectual property is not like physical property?" I assume not, but I'm not sure what you meant to say there.
Agreed, this is a much better comparison! :)
I don't really understand what you mean when you say "semantics aside"
By "semantics", I was referring to the word "property". I mean that if I sell you a loaf of bread, it's a transaction governed by a nearly disjoint set of laws than if I sell you a poem or program that I wrote.
For example, I can't sell you a loaf of bread and force you to eat it on a Monday, but I can sell you a DRM-ed program that only runs on Mondays (enforced by people with heavy sticks and shiny guns ;)).
If our goal is creating a productivity-maximizing society, I think enforcing some restrictions of copyright are a good idea, as long as they "promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts" [1], but current copyright law seems as if it might over-reach that. What I would love to see is a real debate about where the line should be drawn.
The annotations were not destroyed. The work they referenced was removed. The claim is that, absent that work (with its particular page numbers , etc. I'm guessing) those notes are essentially useless, since they now refer to a void.
'Amazon didn’t delete the file containing Gawronski’s notes on the Kindle device. But since the book text “no longer exists, all my notes refer back to nothing,” he said. “I can’t really use it for much.”'
A physical device could be the carrier of a DRM'd piece of data but it has nothing to do with the carrier itself.
Data is just streams of bits no matter what carrier they're on. That data could be encumbered with DRM or it could be 'plain'.
You never 'own' a piece of DRM'd data, these are almost exclusively limited use sublicenses. It's not like buying a book or a record (the vinyl kind). It's more like buying a movie ticket.
No, it's really nothing like that. Semantics aside, intellectual property is not like physical property: it's not subject to the laws physical property is subject to, nor to the right of physical property.