Re: Does Amazon suspend buying accounts too?
This, the license vs sale issue, has been a serious sticking point for Kindle owners, and is a big problem in all digital goods. It has affected Kindle owners several times already: in 2009, there was a class action lawsuit against Amazon on behalf of Kindle owners over Amazon's deletion of George Orwell's 1984. Amazon settled out of court, so we don't have a ruling that gives users any new rights. Under the terms of the settlement, Amazon agreed that it would not remotely delete works from Kindles unless the user agrees to the deletion; the user fails to pay for the book; a court or other regulatory order requires deletion; or deletion is necessary to protect consumers from malicious code.
A year later, in December 2010, Amazon got into trouble again for deleting a whole bunch of erotica titles from its store...and also deleting those titles from users' Kindle archives. When users protested, Amazon restored the titles to the Kindle archives for those users who had already purchased them, and called it a "technical issue."
Two years later, in October 2012, it happened again: Linn Nygaard purchased a Kindle in the UK and then returned to her home in Norway, and continued to use her Kindle, buying books from Amazon's UK store. After working fine for some time, Nygaard's Kindle developed a technical problem, and she called Amazon's customer service to get it replaced. Amazon then closed her account and deleted all her content, and would not even explain to her why until her story got significant media attention -- once the bad press started building up, Amazon reinstated her account and restored her content.
So...short version: Amazon has already been sued about this, and has promised in court that it would severely restrict its ability to delete content on users' Kindles. That hasn't stopped Amazon from deleting content on users' Kindles in ways not covered by the settlement.
The bigger issue, as I mentioned above, is the license vs. sale issue for digital goods. Unfortunately, after 2010's Vernor v. Autodesk decision, courts support this structure. It means that no, you don't generally own the content you buy online. You don't own the copies of the songs you buy on iTunes. You don't own the copies of games you download off Steam. That's what your end user license agreement is telling you: you license them, which basically means you're just borrowing them.
In terms of ToS:DR, it's something you can flag if you want to, because it's something people should care about...but it's how everything is done. Digital content is almost always licensed, not sold -- to find copies actually, explicitly sold online is the exception, rather than the rule. It's another of those situations where red-flagging everything will end up giving the user less information, not more.
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