[brookst]

Should we eliminate the word “buy” from all licenses and rights-restricted transactions? So like concert tickets (you can’t take video at the concert), physical DVDs (you can’t stream them online for other people), airline tickets (airlines reserve all sorts of rights, and international treaties even more), and houses (even if you pay cash, the local government can take your property for a variety of reasons)?

The ambiguity in digital purchases is a real problem, but if physical goods and services haven’t solved the problem with the semantics of “buy”, I’m not sure that’s a productive approach, unless the idea is to just scare people away from digital specifically by implying it’s materially different than other transactions where “buy” does not mean “receive irrevocable and unrestricted exclusive rights forever”.

[yladiz]

I think there is a clear distinction to be drawn here, the simplest being around a physical object or not. Looking at films or music, if you own the physical media and it can’t just be taken away from you (especially if you use a form of the media that is not internet connected, like a cassette tape). Buying the digital version is basically buying a revocable right to watch/listen to the media, rather than the media itself, so I would agree that the term buy is kind of misleading given the implied meaning of the word when it comes to this kind of thing. As the other commenter points out, buying a concert ticket isn’t implying buying the whole concert, and no one would think so, which is unlike what people think when they “buy” a digital movie from Amazon or Apple.

[xigoi]

For tickets, the use is correct — you buy the ticket, the physical piece of paper, which gives you restricted access to a place.