Incomprehensible to me that not a single country's courts put a stop to this. By now this “straight up commercial fraud” has become established industry practice and the corrupted meaning of “buy” (for “lease”) looks set to not only stay with us but gradually replace the old meaning in all walks of life as increasingly everything becomes “smart” (as the oft-quoted Ubik line goes: '“The door refused to open. It said, “Five cents, please.”'). I wonder both how far away we once were from some less dystopian alternative timeline and what the chances of escaping our current apparent trajectory are.
It is worth noting that when I buy a physical book, I am not acquiring ownership of the text. I do not have the right to do with the text what I please (e.g. make copies & distribute). The same goes for music. The same goes for software.
What the format (digital+DRM vs. physical) makes possible is more fine grained control by the owner (or their proxy) of the work.
You seem to imply that technological advances have made new forms of contractual agreements about property possible that are not covered well by existing concepts such as "buy" and "lease" and that therefore to extend the meaning of "buy" to cover app store or kindle purchases is reasonable rather than fraudulent.
What an app store or kindle "purchase" provides you with is exactly a lease. You gain a temporary right to utilize a resource (such as a particular physical or digital copy of a work) subject to various restrictions.
By contrast property rights always imply the ability to transfer (via sale, inheritance or gift or voluntary abandonment) as well as to in fact not transfer. Both of which are fundamentally lost here. You can't sell your kindle ebooks, pass them on to your children or even keep them if Amazon decides otherwise (as in the case of 1984).
And there is absolutely no technical or economic reason you can't inherit or sell a DRM protected work.
> You seem to imply that technological advances have made new forms of contractual agreements about property possible that are not covered well by existing concepts such as “buy” and “lease” and that therefore to extend the meaning of “buy” to cover app store or kindle purchases is reasonable rather than fraudulent.
Nope, licenses as a form of intangible personal property long predate the “modern technological advances” being discussed (or, say, the existence of the US, for example), and the meaning of the word “buy” already encompasses buying licenses, which may have a variety of terms, including termination conditions.
It’s just that you seem to be trying to falsely generalize the specialized meaning of “buy” that applies when the object of the purchase is an item of tangible personal property to things which are not tangible personal property.
Do you have a good example of a pre-digital private everyday transaction where people would use "buy" to refer to entering in some complex licensing arrangement which did not grant any transferable rights?
What you write is true and I see where you are coming from. But my contention is that what you refer to as the "specialized meaning of buy" was pretty much the only meaning an average person would have used it in. And that such a person's reasonable and natural assumption when first confronted with a "buy" button for an ebook would be that it pressing it would confer analogous rights of transfer as buying the physical copy. And furthermore that courts and regulators allowing this assumption to be violated was a major oversight. If for no other reason than that it is foolish to the extreme to bring about a system where a single dominant entity having a bad day could in a blink wipe out a large fraction of accessible books.
It is not a lease though. A lease has a specified time. "Buying" in this context has an unspecified time. I have movies I "bought" on these platforms which have been accessible for well over a decade. If this was forced to be a lease which specified a time (say, 1 year? 5 years?) I would have already lost access to it, massively reducing its value to me.
Extremely long duration != unlimited. Stating "until this person's death" isn't unlimited, it is a very exact end condition which will happen.
A 99 year lease still has an end date on it. These licenses do not have an end date. The only time it is generally supposed to become unavailable is "due to potential content provider licensing restrictions or for other reasons."
Buying a limited license which allows "an indefinite period of time" is still inherently different from renting. It is definitely different from buying a physical good, I do agree. But I still don't seem to be convinced that its "renting" or "leasing".
If Amazon had to put an end date ahead of time on all the movies they listed with "Buy", do you think they'd put that date as 99 years or would they make it more like one year? Personally I'm perfectly fine with the tradeoff that sure, some move I "bought" 15 years ago on Amazon might some day disappear from their service, as I knew it ahead of time that was the trade-off of "buying" a license on their Unbox service versus owning a physical copy of the VHS or DVD at the time. But in the end I felt it was worth the tradeoff for the connivence.
For all we know Amazon may continue on forever, offering some kind of version of its streaming service and continue to offer these movies forever. Its not guaranteed Amazon will lose the rights to some of these movies, its not guaranteed they'll stop offering a streaming service, its not guaranteed they'll eventually be replaced by Walmart which will buy out Weyland-Yutani. There's no real pre-defined end condition to it at all, other than until the rights holders say we can't or until some other situation happens that makes it unavailable.
Its definitely different than owning a physical good, I completely agree. Its still very different from renting or leasing.
Uhm, you are aware that the Kindle license is limited by your death, right? (Outside of Delaware, and maybe a few other places which have passed explicit legislation overriding this to allow for inheritance of ebooks). How is this different in any way from a lifetime lease agreement?
Is it? Where does it say the license terminates at your death? Could you quote it?
It's non-transferable (i.e., can't move it from the account), but it doesn't list death as the end of the license. If a family member of mine dies but has a bunch of "purchased" movies on their account, those licenses don't just disappear. They remain on the account until the account is closed. I don't think the Amazon Terms of Service requires me to have a pulse to continue to have an Amazon account, and the license terms listed in the link I provided above clearly allows family members to access the media licensed to my account as long as it otherwise is allowed under the above terms, which never references death.
I don't see any reason why my spouse wouldn't be able to access Super Troopers on my Amazon account purchased back when the service was Amazon Unbox after my death, assuming Amazon still has a streaming service, and they still have the rights to stream that movie on the platform, etc. If I'm wrong, please feel free to point it out to me on the Amazon ToS.
> How is this different in any way from a lifetime lease agreement?
It’s different from a lifetime lease in that there is nothing to revert. The subject of the lease is not an enduring, rivalrous “thing” (tangible or intangible) which is returned to the owner, it is a use permission which is extinguished.
Eh, one “buys” the right to temporarily have the item on their device, until Amazon decides to revoke that right.
As OP said,
> I'm never buying e-books again.
I do something similar.
If the book is worth it, I buy it in material form.
If it’s not worth the bookshelf clutter it’ll cause, I just skip it.
But then again, most of my books aren’t on digital subjects, for that I usually rely on specs and articles, as tech is moving too quickly to be worth being nailed down on paper.
Those listings are usually honest. Misleading, yes, but nowhere in them does it state you are buying anything other than a box. The even more misleading ones, helped by the product name, are selling x-box boxes.
I'd argue that the “buy now” when viewing a Kindle edition listing, or Audible edition, is noticeably less honest, especially as you are usually at most on click away from the dead-tree editions where buy actually does mean buy. I'd have that iphone box that I'd legally bought for as long as I choose to own it, the seller can not revoke access to it arbitrarily like Amazon can, will, and sometimes has (1984 being the most famous and somewhat ironic example) with ebooks and audiobooks.
PSA that audible encryption can be stripped very easily with ffmpeg (`-activation_bytes`; for archival and interop purposes, naturally), and it's faster and easier to crack your personal encryption key than to figure out how to request it from audible servers.
What you describe is a lease. Leasing or renting specifically grants you the right to use something for a period of time without a transfer of ownership. If Amazon are leasing you a book, labelling the button "Buy" is fraud. The problem here is that trade laws were not written for digital-only items so Amazon and their ilk get away with this fraud.
This is so incredibly wrong I have to comment.
Most people's leases roll over into month-to-month. You can easily add clauses to say it goes on for an unlimited time until someone revokes.
Yeah, that's absolutely one way to look at it. It could be less, it could be more. However, I still have access to movies I "bought" well over a decade ago on Amazon Unbox, meanwhile every movie I've "rented" on the service I no longer have access to.
I'd say their record overall points to the license offering potentially more value over the short term defined rentals, if you're planning on watching the content again.
Amazon isn't hiding any of this, there's a link to this that's close to the "Buy" button on their site and they mention you're agreeing to it when you check out. It is pretty easy to read and comprehend, it is not exactly fine print.
FWIW in the above 1984 example it is because lots of people were publishing it when they had no rights to. I do agree that speaks volumes on Amazon not properly policing their platform and that they mishandled it. They should have instead properly credited people access to the properly licensed version.
Especially on Amazon, I don't think this holds muster when "buying" on Kindle is listed directly next to other options which are genuinely purchasing a book with nothing to differentiate that the Kindle one is not actually a purchase of a book.
The issue in the US is harm has to be done first and the compensation is based on the harm done.
You are only harmed when amazon loses rights to media you purchased and that harm is easily measured in terms of the monetary value of the thing they took from you (which, they'll likely refund if you start talking to lawyers because it's not worth it to them.)
What we need is to get corporations out of politics.
I don't read anywhere in here where an unaffected individual can raise a case and collect money. Rather, this sets up how the government can enforce the law at various levels. That's pretty standard stuff everywhere (that's why every state has a department of justice). The government can police, but me, and average citizen, can't raise a case against amazon.
Class action lawsuits are civil lawsuits. You can't raise a civil lawsuit if you aren't harmed.