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by eldaisfish 1270 days ago
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.
1 comments
vel0city 1270 days ago
> Leasing or renting specifically grants you the right to use something for a period of time without a transfer of ownership.

What's the stated time period here? 1 year? 5 years?

It is an indeterminate amount of time. It is not a lease.

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garbagecoder 1269 days ago
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.
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TheCoelacanth 1270 days ago
So, it's even less rights than a lease because you could lose it at any time, you aren't even guaranteed to keep it the full term of a lease.
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vel0city 1270 days ago
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.

https://www.primevideo.com/help?nodeId=202095490&view-type=c...

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xigoi 1270 days ago
The period of time is “until they decide they don't want to lease you the book anymore”.
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vel0city 1270 days ago
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.
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