[sound2man]

I don't think that this is an issue of not backing up. The student bought what he supposed to be a legit copy of a book, than amazon remotely deleted it, along with his notes. There should be a mechanism to backup notes, separate from the book associated with them, but i don't believe there is one. Correct me if I'm wrong.

[ShabbyDoo]

For me, the issue is that Amazon purposefully deleted his notes. They certainly must have known that this would be a side effect of removing a title from a Kindle.

[jacquesm]

Whether there is or is not is not really the problem here, if there is he should have used it, if there isn't he shouldn't be using the kindle for any note taking of stuff that he thinks is important enough to sue over.

The kindles DRM is not exactly news, personally I would never ever buy a device that allows some company far away decide whether or not I can read something that I already have, no matter how I got it. It's absolutely horrible. But the fault in this case lies clearly with the student, not with amazon.

[anigbrowl]

I feel the same way, but this is a tip-of-the-iceberg issue. what happens if you're working the cloud and MegaCorp zaps your thesis/subscriber database/whatever? Yeah, one should back up but part of the idea of cloud computing is you pay for availability and security. It may be a frivolous lawsuit, but it's probably going to be an important test case unless Amazon settles.

[jacquesm]

That's a good point.

What I'm really wondering about is if there is no proof that the notes ever existed and amazon has no record of their being backed up how will he be able to claim damage ?

You would at a minimum have to have some proof the notes existed in the first place.

When I sign up with a hosting company there is a very explicit provision that they are not liable for information loss, and rightly so. After all they can't possibly figure out the value I assign to my data. It may be random garbage or very important stuff, it's up to me to assign priorities and to back up the stuff that I think is important to me.

I assume the same applies to the cloud, hosting your data in the cloud is not a backup strategy.

[sound2man]

True on the backup front, but I must admit that I probably wouldn't have thought about that.

As to the DRM on Kindle, it has bee known, but I don't think their ability and willingness to delete a "legitimately" purchased book remotely has been until this incident. Isn't this the first time that a book has been deleted over the air?

[jacquesm]

It was. Of course then nobody thought it was important enough to raise a racket over. Apple does the same thing with their 'kill switch' on the applications in the app store.

These are the most public examples of how we are changing from 'sale' to 'lease' of everything with which that is technically possible.

Jeff Bezos and Steve Jobs should take a public stand against this instead of being handmaidens to the new world order. They ought to be very much ashamed of themselves.