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Why Those “Buy Now” Buttons Are So Misleading

Why Those “Buy Now” Buttons Are So Misleading: When it comes to physical products, we have a pretty good idea of what ownership means. If you own a vinyl record, you can lend it to a friend. You can sell your old VHS tape collection on eBay. You can donate your book collection to the local library or leave it to someone in your will. Or you could rent a storage unit and hoard to your heart’s content. No one will stop you. Through a lifetime of experience with physical goods, most of us understand intuitively what it means to buy things and to own them. Words like own and buy prime consumers to rely on these familiar concepts of personal property to understand their rights in digital purchases. But those engrained consumer expectations are a far less reliable guide for digital goods.

The Department of Commerce’s Internet Policy Task Force recently took note of the Buy Now button’s potential for consumer deception. Copyright holders respond to this critique by insisting that consumers don’t take the “Buy Now” language literally, or even more implausibly, that they think “Buy Now” means “Buy a Copyright License Now.” As Ben Sheffner of the Motion Picture Association of America recently told the Task Force, “If you ask people when you go to a site to buy a movie or a book or a song, I think they pretty much understand that … you’re purchasing or buying a license which permits you to do certain things.”

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