Amid the general love-fest over the Amazon Kindle, its DRM is beginning to bite some users in the butt as they are getting locked out of their accounts and, subsequently, their e-book purchases. The incidents highlight once again that the customer doesn't really own the content when it comes to DRM; even when it's so loose that it's not apparent day to day, it can still hurt you in the long run.

Kindle users have been grumbling lately about Amazon locking them out of their accounts, reportedly due to an overly high volume of returns on their Kindle books. ChannelWeb draws attention to the plight of one user who admitted to three "high-priced returns," though he denied abusing Amazon's return policy. Despite this, Amazon banned him from making more purchases from the online store, which also locked him out of accessing his already-purchased Kindle items.

This particular user eventually got his account reinstated, with Amazon warning that it could revoke access again in the future. Though the phenomenon isn't common enough to be considered an epidemic, a number of other users reported that they had a similar account lock-out from Amazon, turning their Kindles into $360 paperweights.

Certainly, this is the type of thing that gives old-school bibliophiles�reason to continue trashing the Kindle. A bookstore that locks you out because you treated it like a library doesn't take away the collection already sitting on your bookshelf, after all.

Incidents like this remind us of what happened in the digital music realm when MSN Music, Yahoo Music, and Wal-Mart decided to turn off their DRM authentication servers�after their music services went dead. This still left users with playable music files, but no DRM servers meant that they couldn't authorize any new devices in the future, therefore limiting them to the devices (and operating systems) they had already set up. Ultimately, customer complaints got loud enough that all three companies decided to leave the servers online for a while longer, but to pretend this couldn't happen with already-purchased Kindle books would be an act of willful ignorance.

Amazon is perfectly capable of yanking customer access to their books at any time—whether the service shuts down or not. The only way to get around it would be to break the user agreement with Amazon and crack the DRM, but that, too, puts you at risk of being barred from purchasing new books. Amazon's DRM won't disappear anytime soon. It's mostly-benign existence reminds us that, while DRM may be dead for music, it's definitely alive and well in other forms of media.