Amazon Misplaying Its Stated Mission

Amazon did pull down a DVD last year that showed, according to the complaint, 20 dogs engaged in fights featuring graphic footage. The Humane Society says those DVDs are illegal, but Smith says Amazon took them down on two occasions because they were distasteful, not for legal reasons.

Smith pointed, with just a tad more pride than was necessary, to books on Amazon that describe illegal activities but that are not themselves illegal: home-grown drugs, do-it-yourself bombs and suicide how-tos. "There are books out there like Secrets of Methamphetamine Manufacture, or Final Exit by the Hemlock Society," Smith says. "Absolutely, we sell them."

There is something a little too blithe about how easily Amazon reaches for the free-speech card. As a safe harbor, free speech is precious but devilishly complex. Whenever it comes before the Supreme Court, it's always fraught with a good deal of agonizing, complexity, slippery slopes and dangerous precedents. There's nothing cut-and-dried or cavalier about it.

So Amazon's free-speech proclamations would ring louder if it weren't also making a profit from the works it considers distasteful. Every subscription of Feathered Warrior, every copy of the reviled Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, gives Amazon money that ends up in the pockets of employees, executives and ultimately shareholders. Just how comfortable each one is in sharing what others call "blood money" is up to each individual.

I asked Smith whether Amazon would consider donating to charities any profit from its most controversial publications -- a negligible amount of its annual revenue, yet a priceless gesture, one that could fend off boycotts and underscore that its free-speech defense is more than rhetoric.

She grew indignant: "So you should only profit from popular speech?" she scoffed, before offering me a terse lecture on free speech. "I find it absolutely astonishing that as a journalist you'd talk about the rhetoric of free speech."

Point taken. Next time I'll bite my tongue.