We don't purchase products anymore, at least not digital things. Instead we're always buying a service.
Buying includes a very short period of trust between you and the seller, where you give them money, and they give you the product in return. Sometimes there's also a long trust involved due to warranty, but more often than not those failed me in the past, so I stopped taking them into account when making a purchase.
But a service is a long term relationship between a customer and a service provider, and those ALWAYS failed me, if they existed for long enough.
Amazon does not sell books to Kindle, but instead provides a service of renting Kindle books. The cause of confusion here is them using a wrong term to describe what they do.
Unfortunately, it will take legislation to forbid them from stating or suggesting that you are actually purchasing digital goods.
We should get a law that forbids any SaaS or media-rental company from ever using "purchase" in their advertising and operation. It could be the Interned Digital Goods Advertisement Fraud Act, or IDGAF act - as in "I don't give a f__k what you say; if I can't keep them forever and copy them around, those ain't 'goods' I'm buying, it's a rental service".
> We don't purchase products anymore, at least not digital things. Instead we're always buying a service.
This is certainly what Amazon etc write in their terms and would like the legal system to enforce, but I think it's clear that most normal humans don't really think of it like this.
The strongest argument that they don't is that the prices for films that you buy on google play and the books that you buy on amazon cost the same as they did before.
Quite clearly, ownership rights are not worth nothing, so if the public are prepared to pay the same rates, the most likely explanation is that they are confused about what they are getting. There's been no real effort to disabuse them either - the amazon ebook site says 'Buy now', google play says 'buy'. What we're seeing is large tech companies trying (and so far succeeding) to redefine what it means to buy and to own things.
People probably don't even think about the fact that if the company went bust or decided to stop offering their service, potentially thousands of dollars worth of things they thought they owned would go up in a puff of electrons.
20 years ago, people would have CD, DVD or book collections that would be insured for significant amounts of money. Is it possible to insure access to a digital media collection?
Buying includes a very short period of trust between you and the seller, where you give them money, and they give you the product in return. Sometimes there's also a long trust involved due to warranty, but more often than not those failed me in the past, so I stopped taking them into account when making a purchase.
But a service is a long term relationship between a customer and a service provider, and those ALWAYS failed me, if they existed for long enough.
Amazon does not sell books to Kindle, but instead provides a service of renting Kindle books. The cause of confusion here is them using a wrong term to describe what they do.