There are MANY of us who work for Amazon who do not support the removal of WikiLeaks (or the recent book-banning thing). Both cases set off long email threads on the issue, and left the bad taste of censorship and general mistrust in our mouths.<p>Unfortunately, there isn't much we can do. It's not like the company is commenting on it internally or taking input from its employees. Then again, which company does?<p>This is the grim reality of working for a corporation - you are working for them and participate in all sorts of decision-making that benefits them greatly, but when it comes to things like this they make the decision for you and give a different meaning to a brand you helped build up.<p>It's starting to feel like in a country controlled by a few politicians and the corporations funding those politicians, we have no say period :(<p>-Disgusted Amazon Employee
The message goes beyond simply quoting ToS:<p>"Further, 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."<p>If that's not taking a position, I don't know what is.
Amazon makes two claims as to why they kicked wikileaks. The first, is this portion of their TOS: "you represent and warrant that you own or otherwise control all of the rights to the content"<p>It is clear that many of their customers do not own or otherwise control all of the rights to the content they host on Amazon's servers. For instance, take tarsnap or SmugMug. They both host clients' property on Amazon servers. Now, while those companies may control <i>some</i> of the rights to the information they are storing , it is clear that those companies do not own nor control "all rights" to that content. SmugMug cannot legally license or resell my photos to others, for example.<p>As for their claim that it puts people in danger, they cite not a single confirmed case where this has happened.
Amazon is making two claims of ToS violations:
1. "WikiLeaks doesn’t own or otherwise control all the rights to [the] classified content the material"
2. Use of Wikileaks content could "cause injury to [some] person or entity"<p>The claims have some merit and Amazon has the right to discontinue service on the basis of ToS violations. But they seem to be applying, in the first instance, the same criterion to this case as they would to ordinary cases of copyright infringements, which seems ethically weak and a little outlandish. And while the second claim is at least superficially more compelling, the standard seems unusually broad. Isn't it the case, if only trivially, that Amazon already hosts and sells a lot of content that could conceivably be used by someone, somewhere to cause injury to some person or entity? In general, is the content provider absolutely responsible for the uses to which its content is put, and does Amazon really want to be in the business of policing that? The argument, presumably, is that Wikileaks' documents constitute an egregious and specific possible cause of injury, although Amazon still seems to be blurring the distinction between "causing" and "making possible" or "enabling", and discounting the possible good that the release of classified documents can do. I think it's also worth pointing out that Wikileaks has adopted a fairly heavy hand with regard to redactions in the past months, and asked Amnesty and the Pentagon (apparently in vain) to help in that process. Some minimal context for Wikileaks' actions and the Amazon message, not all of which throws the best possible light on Wikileaks:<p><a href="http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2010/08/20/wikileaks" rel="nofollow">http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2010/08/20...</a><p><a href="http://articles.cnn.com/2010-10-22/us/wikileaks.editing_1_wikileaks-founder-julian-assange-redacted-documents?_s=PM:US" rel="nofollow">http://articles.cnn.com/2010-10-22/us/wikileaks.editing_1_wi...</a><p><a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/aug/10/afghanistan-war-logs-wikileaks-human-rights-groups" rel="nofollow">http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/aug/10/afghanistan-war-...</a><p><a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/11/29/AR2010112905743.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/11...</a>
Section 105 of the Copyright Act<p>"Copyright protection under this title is not available for any work of the United States Government, but the United States Government is not precluded from receiving and holding copyrights transferred to it by assignment, bequest, or otherwise."
Amazon has lawyers, and at least some of those lawyers must be experts in the subject of copyright. It is not credible that Amazon was unaware that Government documents are not eligible for copyright. Instead, this response appears to be an attempt to justify the decision after it was made.<p>Interesting, for example, that Amazon does not deny Congressional pressure but simply states that reports of government inquiry prompting this action are "inaccurate".
I appreciate the furstrated tone of that message.<p>Is this the only time Amazon has put out a message like this?<p><a href="http://www.google.com/search?q=inurl:http://aws.amazon.com/message/" rel="nofollow">http://www.google.com/search?q=inurl:http://aws.amazon.com/m...</a>
Some of the lines of Amazon's terms, at least the way they are interpreted in this message, should be concerning to other sites hosting on Amazon. For example:<p>"that use of the content you supply does not violate this policy and will not cause injury to any person or entity"<p>Any large scale UGC site likely hosts content that might cause injury to a person or entity. This term would seem to give Amazon the right to shut down the site simply by pointing to such a piece of content.<p>I am not actually concerned about this, since I think that in practice Amazon operates according to far less restrictive terms than these. But it is interesting to see the rights they are reserving.
Ohhh Wow, Amazon is clearly not doing this because the government said so, they are just rejecting Wikileaks for the same reason.<p>For all I know those documents could be fake, and I don't really know how did they determine that they could put the life of people in danger...<p>This whole thing is like a death sentence without a trial, I can't really blame Amazon though, the government must be really stepping on their toes.
This could be a great opportunity for some US hosting provider to step in and show that it can be counted on to have a backbone and take a stand in regards to seemingly unjust takedowns like this.<p>Maybe if a smaller company could scale to take on the wikileaks load, they might be able to earn trust and gain business from people that see the righteousness in the move.
While I don't object to amazon booting wikileaks, I don't think this message helps. The only message I would have posted, if I posted at all, is that we keep client customer support matters confidential to protect the privacy of our customers, and possibly not even written it in a way which confirms wikileaks was ever a customer.
"There have been reports that a government inquiry prompted us not to serve WikiLeaks any longer. That is inaccurate."<p>More like:<p>We got another government inquiry that told us to state that we never got an inquiry in the first place.