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As this emphasizes, You don't own these items, you're merely leasing them. That's why I've spent exactly $3.98 on two Amazon Kindle books (a bunch more at $0), both in part to tell me if I want to buy more from the respective authors. Vs. a few hundred in non-DRMed digital books and music, the latter all though Amazon (would be a lot more if I didn't have a massive bias towards physical media and a very good insurance policy).

A good example of one of the own goals of Google+: their Real Names policy + account consolidation meant violating, in their view, the former meant loss to all of the latter, including most catastrophically GMail.

Oh, yeah, per his tweets, he lost the remaining balance of his Prime account. Nice way to reward loyalty.

In general, one cannot revoke a lease without recourse.
The problem, of course, is that enforcing that in courts is expensive. Heck, unless he kept a separate record of his purchases (ADDED: tjl pointed out he very possiblely has that in his emails), he doesn't even know prior to discovery what his damages are.

At least the net also allows trying to enforce this in the court of public opinion.

yeah, but what are the terms of the license/lease. I haven't read it/don't know, but what if the terms are basically "you have access for as long as we feel like giving you access"
Take it to court and terms that ... convenient to the vendor very possibly would not hold up. For something like books, with versions that are tangable and massively litigated on over half a millennium, I suspect Amazon would lose badly, after of course the other side spent many times the losses.

At least in the case of Amazon, with its reputation being such a big factor in its success, if you had to go to court the bad PR from such a white line case would almost certainly result in a quick and favorable settlement.

The licenses are now days almost always the exact same: you have no rights beyond what the law in your country explicitly gives you and which can't be removed by the contract.
It is a cautionary tale. And one where, like people who "bought" their original DivX disks learned, and other folks have learned.

That said, Amazon will fix this. They are still in business and you can sue them both for breach of contract and to collect legal costs of suing them. Sometimes just a letter will fix it. But the next course of action is to create a new account as they asked you to do, and then provide proof of your previous purchases on the old account and tell them to transfer them all to the new account. I would do that in a letter (written).

This is an extreme way to handle unauthorized access. Just have him change his passwords, don't destroy his account.

It also shows the perils of DRM. Thousands of dollars can disappear in an instant for whatever reason, and often there's little we can do about it.

> often there's little we can do about it

They could issue a refund, unless Amazon thought his previous purchases were also unauthorized.

Companies continue to store more and more customer data and property online, out of direct control of the customer, and in increasingly proprietary formats, all governed by vague and often unfriendly terms of service, and all of it at risk of compromise and theft, and all of these companies are racing to provide less customer service than their competitors so that they can operate at slightly lower cost. The only way to resolve disputes is to raise a big stink on discussion sites and social media and hope the story gets enough traction that somebody somewhere at the company can be moved to care.

Everybody keeps doing it because, "Hey, it's always worked out fine for me. I have never had any trouble with Amazon's | Apple's | Paypal's | Google's | Facebook's | LinkedIn's | Microsoft's | Github's | Craigslist's | YouTube's customer service."

(A few people think this situation isn't too great for the consumer and try not to participate, but we're crazy.)

It's too bad this happened to him, but this isn't exactly news. This story has been repeating itself for a decade at least, just the names and details keep changing.

Here's to the crazy ones.

( Sorry, I couldn't resist. I found it funny in a sad/ironic way. )

Hope this gets sorted, Amazon clearly need to improve how they handle such situations. If all else fails complaining to your credit card company should get a refund.
Clearly they don't need to improve. "BWA HA HA HA" and all that.
The Kindle has been out for 8 years, and as I recall chargebacks only go out 6 months.
You know... I'm thinking about all the times I've heard people laugh that I have four full shelves of computer books. Hardcopy books. Actual books.

It reminds me of how people used to laugh at me for wearing my neck protector on my body armor in Iraq and the Philippines. It wasn't required to wear it, but I always did. People laughed, until they heard about a friend of mine whose neck was ripped open by shrapnel that would have been stopped by the same protector. He bled out on a random, dirty street in Baghdad.

I'll take hardcopy, thanks.

As someone who started using tape backup in 1978 (sic) and first bought body armor in 1984 (sic), yeah, I hear you. And my personal anecdote is how multiple forms of backups saved my critical data from this: http://www.ancell-ent.com/1715_Rex_Ave_127B_Joplin/images/ (rsync.net, since the disk backups in the bathroom got trashed). Fortunately haven't had to put body armor to real use.

But between the way I prefer to use many computer books (multiple windows on a big screen), the ease of saving them to multiple backup sites (every time I buy digital media I upload copies to rsync.net and ironically Amazon's free (5GiB?) service, plus they're in my normal backup systems), how fast their content gets obsolete, and their lower price, I tend to buy them. But only for the perishable stuff, I get e.g. CS books in hard cover.

As I noted elsewhere, you also want those physical shelves backed up by a good insurance policy, and for you I recommend USAA, my father started with them in the 50s, and especially due to tornadoes and the like we've had to make a lot of claims.

(Note: “Sic” doesn’t mean what you think it means.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sic

When you buy files with drm, you get what you pay for: nothing.
I download my Kindle books, strip the DRM, and store them in Calibre with backups in AWS' Glacier.

Doesn't work for everyone, but its easier than lugging a book collection across the world. I'm paying for convenience.

I think the analogy doesn't work very well. You pay more than nothing.
Piracy: The Better Choice(tm). http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/1043337/hd-disk-for...

Seriously. If there's any book you've paid actual money for, then an ePub copy as well is a sensible backup. Don't let your stuff be hostage to DRM.

Could there be legal recourse via small claims court? They basically revoked $1,000 dollars worth of media licenses without recourse.
Since Amazon locked him out of the account and apparently can't access its contents, he can't even present any information about what was on it. He'd have to get into discovery or get some court order against Amazon just to recover a record of what he wants to sue over.
He'd have records in e-mail as to what he's purchased.
Good point, but the Kindle has been out for 8 years, and I'll bet a lot of people have lost at least some of the email over that time.

(Of course, I say this as someone who during that period used rsync.net and LTO-4 tape to make sure that didn't happen even in the face of a tornado that trashed my apartment.)

When I do buy Kindle books, I make sure I can remove the DRM and backup offsite. I should not have to do this.
> In a move that angered customers and generated waves of online pique, Amazon remotely deleted some digital editions of [1984 and Animal Farm] from the Kindle devices of readers who had bought them.[0]

That's when I stopped leasing DRM stuff from Amazon and other sellers.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/18/technology/companies/18ama...

Why do we have to resort to public outcries to get attention from a company?

If the user agreement really allows this, then it is time to stop supporting them.

He's probably trying to warn others thinking it's something nobody knows. Of course, we've all been warned about DRM for years now, but people seems to ignore the risks.
I only read the tldr, but really, hasn't this been obvious since these schemes existed? It's at once the ultimate lock-in (can't rage quit) and the ultimate lockout.
Did you ask the account team to restore your purchases to the replacement account? If so, what was the response?

The mere fact that they didn't think to do it for you honestly doesn't seem like it's as serious as you make this sound.

Well, at least to me, losing $1000 worth of access to digital media that he has paid, with no recourse, it is as serious as its sound.

Amazon staff can think this is not serious as its sound, this is just a drop in the ocean for the company.

It maybe easy to fix, but if its not communicated properly, it can go both ways for the customer, so yes, it can be serious, unless Amazon confirms that its not.

Apparently there's no way https://twitter.com/softwaredoug/status/628911762105049088
Follow-up: "We have re-opened your account and everything is intact." Amazon's customer service came through after all.
This seems annoying but it's clearly still in progress - Amazon didn't tell him to fuck off, and are still working on a resolution. For the digital haters - houses burn down too.
There is no sign from his writings about this that Amazon is working on a resolution, no doubt that's why he's thrown it into the court of public opinion. ADDED: just checked his linked Twitter feed and Amazon restored his accounts with no explanation to speak of: https://twitter.com/softwaredoug/status/628978794129436672 The tweet with the largest number of retweets got only 15....

As for "houses burn down too", tornadoes trash them as well, e.g. http://www.ancell-ent.com/1715_Rex_Ave_127B_Joplin/images/ and I lost over 200 physical books, records, CDs and DVDs. But since I had a good insurance policy, I got them replaced or otherwise covered, which I seriously doubt is possible with DRMed digital media (just tried some searches with no luck).

In this case the house was burned down by the owner( company ) because someone broke in.
Write a song about it.