Why did Big Brother remove paid-for content from amazon kindle's Kindles? George Orwell always had a fine ear for hypocrisy. Even so, quite what he would have made of last week's Kindle debacle, in which Amazon was accused of tactics reminiscent of Big Brother, is unclear. When it emerged that the company had secretly deleted copies of Orwell's novels from people's Kindle ebook readers because of a legal issue, the irony was too delicious to ignore: the writer who best charted authoritarian attitudes in 1984 and Animal Farm had become the victim of a sort of eerie censorship. It turned out to be a copyright issue - MobileReference, the company that sold the copies, did not have the rights to use Orwell's work