My latest Guardian column, “Downloads give Amazon jungle fever,” asks the question: how can a company that gets online selling so right get downloads so wrong?

As a consumer advocate and activist, I’m delighted by almost every public policy initiative from Amazon. When the Author’s Guild tried to get Amazon to curtail its used-book market, the company refused to back down. Founder Jeff Bezos (who is a friend of mine) even wrote, “when someone buys a book, they are also buying the right to resell that book, to loan it out, or to even give it away if they want. Everyone understands this.”

More recently, Amazon stood up to the US government, who’d gone on an illegal fishing expedition for terrorists (TERRORISTS! TERRORISTS! TERRORISTS!) and asked Amazon to turn over the purchasing history of 24,000 Amazon customers. The company spent a fortune fighting for our rights, and won.

It also has a well-deserved reputation for taking care over copyright “takedown” notices for the material that its customers post on its site, discarding ridiculous claims rather than blindly acting on every single notice, no matter how frivolous.

But for all that, it has to be said: Whenever Amazon tries to sell a digital download, it turns into one of the dumbest companies on the web.

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Peter Anderson’s written a fanfic homage to my story Printcrime, called “The Copper Responds” — in it, Peter retells the story from the policeman’s point of view. It’s a fascinating exercise — Peter even kept to the same number of paragraphs as Printcrime!

Coppers, they called us, at first for the color of the buttons that gleamed down the chests of our navy blue uniforms, but later for the way we always made them cop to their crimes. In time we adopted the name for ourselves. And cop they did – they always confessed. Some pleaded innocence at first, but after only a few minutes inside the interrogation room they’d confess to anything, just to make it stop. We probably could have detained most of them anyway, locked them up indefinitely, but a formal confession made their guilt official, neat and tidy and impervious to any attorney who might get involved, not that many attorneys ever did.

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The Italian magazine Delos Science Fiction has published Stefano Bonora’s Creative Common-licensed translation of my story When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth, under the title “Quando i sistemisti domineranno la Terra.”

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Kyt Dotson has written a fantastic piece of fanfic about, well, me! She writes, “Since xkcd has been pushing the whole red cape and goggles for Cory, I decided to extend the mythology myself — as a writer I suspect it’s one of the things we are wont to do anyway. So I wrote Hello Cory, which is basically a Cory Doctorow fan fiction/cameo set with the Mill Avenue Vexations universe (no, if you don’t live in Tempe, AZ you probably haven’t heard of it.) And I Creative Commons licensed the work, just because a suitable tribute to Cory could accept nothing less.”

Who did you piss off?”

“The MAFIAA.”

I’d heard that acronym before, but I don’t run in quite the right circles to fully grasp its significance. Elaine would rant about how they were collectively destroying music and movies and treated everyone like criminals.

He went on. “The MPAA and the RIAA will certainly want to intercept me. This is why I’ve been traveling by night with the camouflaged balloon. I had to leave it a few miles back.” An expression of sorrow crossed his face. “I figured that I was flying in the right direction, but I lost my star fix and had to slow down to get my bearings. That’s when they fell upon me. Dark shapes like wicked fingers slashed out of the night from all directions, I tried to out run them with the phlogiston overdrive…but the fiends had struck the boiler and then it ruptured.”

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Update: And the next morning, Paul Parkinson read this aloud and put the MP3 online!