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.
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?
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.
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.