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Originally Posted by Kali Yuga
I don't recall the specific procedure from purchasing my Kindle, but I'd be surprised if there wasn't a click-through agreement at some point in the process -- most likely at purchase, since it was already tied to my account by the time it was shipped.
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Click through agreements do not trump law. Whatever a click through agreement says is irrelevant. IF it is illegal, then it doesn't matter what their agreement says. Customers can not sign away their legal rights in the fine print of a contract. IF (notice that's an IF) Amazon is breaking the law by deleting content that the customer owns, then click through agreements or clauses in a TOS are irrelevant. It's also highly debatable whether "click-through" agreements themselves are even legally enforceable (but that's another topic).
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You are also not purchasing tangible property, you're licensing content.
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That's not true either. US courts have already ruled on this. The way Amazon is selling eBooks is a sale, not a license. Other industries have tried the exact same argument with DRM in the courts, and have lost.
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For example, a shareware application has the legal right to time out and render itself completely inoperable -- not much different than a deletion. MMORPG's can wipe out virtual objects that are "owned" by your character, or even delete your character altogether for any reason they see fit. I've seen Microsoft server products that, if used in a way that just implies that you're not using it within the scope of the license, will actually shut down the entire server in 30 minutes. (You can't move certain FSMO roles off of an SBS server, in case you're curious.  )
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Shareware tells you upfront that there is a timeout (that's why it's a license)... Amazon does not.
In all the examples I know of, the MMORPG data is deleted from the companies server, not from your PC. They specifically design the MMORPG so that the data is on their central servers because of this.
Microsoft denies access, but does NOT delete customer data. Why do you think they even let you run it for 30 minutes at a time? It's because they can't deny access to you from retrieving your own data. I'm sure MS would rather make it so that the server wouldn't even boot, but they aren't allowed to do that. I'm pretty sure that's been through the courts, but I don't remember specifics.
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Seriously, if you don't think your online purchases or other online behavior are eminently trackable, you're fooling yourself. Buy an e-book from any online vendor, and that purchase will stay in their database for as long as it exists.
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Tracking is one thing. Deleting user owned content off of a user's device is an entirely different matter.