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Comment by tdrdt | Hacker News Reader

I think one simple legislation could help a lot: forbid to use the word 'buy' in this context. Instead it should be 'hire' or 'lease' or something.

Once I 'bought' an e-book that was copy protected by Adobe (my fault I didn't read the specs before buying). But because you can only read it when Adobe's servers are online no ownership is transferred to you as buyer. You buy rights to read the book on their terms.

'Hire this book' would be fair to use in this context.

(Afterwards I successfully converted to book to an e-book format that I owned with some Calibre plugins).

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Nobody gives a flying fuck whether the terms are legally accurate. This distinction is entirely already covered in the existing terms of service.

People are annoyed that they can pay for something (sometimes an essential identity service), be arbitrarily denied it, and have no recourse other than maybe getting lucky by writing a complaint post that gets traction and read by some human who can tell the abuse department they've fricked it.

Companies shouldn't be able to shift the burden of the negative aspects of running an online service (dealing with abuse) entirely onto society by offering no meaningful appeal process. Regulation isn't an appealing option, but companies have full well demonstrated that they aren't going to handle these cases unless forced to.

> People are annoyed that they can pay for something (sometimes an essential identity service), be arbitrarily denied it, and have no recourse other than maybe getting lucky by writing a complaint post that gets traction and read by some human who can tell the abuse department they've fricked it.

I think the reasoning for changing the verbiage from "buy" to something more truthful is because most people don't even know this is a thing. Outside of hacker news and gaming subreddits, how many people are actually aware that digital video games they've "bought" can easily be revoked? I don't believe the average person is aware.

I am not saying people give a fuck it is legally accurate. But since nobody ever reads the terms and conditions this could help to give a quick understanding of what you are paying for.

Everybody knows that renting a car is different than buying a car.

You're spot on, it might not fix the entire problem but it's a good start and can help waking people up.

This rent economy is horseshit. "You will own nothing and be happy". In reality we keep paying for things we never get to own, then one day have them arbitrarily taken away from us if the company feels like it. Remember how we used to buy things and then they were ours? Like the music we paid for. Now people have a subscription and when it ends your entire library gets deleted. I still don't understand how the majority of people actually signed up for this, it's a horrible deal that doesn't benefit them one bit.

The music example is more acceptable though, because you don't pay a 1-time fee to own a song anymore.

When you "buy" a game, you pay a 1-time fee with the implicit calculation that you'll own that game for enough time for it to be worth the cost.

When you listen to a song on Spotify, there's no expectation that that song will be available next month, and it doesn't matter, since you didn't pay for the song.

Words do go a long way and can make the distinction clear for potential customers.

As an example, in Sweden, a country with historically strong consumer-protection regulation, you are not allowed to market something as "gratis" (free) if you need to pay to receive it. You can say something is "included" or "receive X without additional cost when buying Y", but free needs to be truly free of cost. You are also not allowed to say "the [best/fastest/strongest]" etc without pointing to an independent party backing it up. Carlsberg gets around this with "probably the best beer in the world", for example. They would not be allowed to drop the "probably", and it would take more than some random magazine or website to address that.

It does make a real difference in businesses ability to manipulate consumer expectations.

I agree with OP that requiring "buy" to mean actual transfer of ownership without hooks would make a huge difference.

>I think one simple legislation could help a lot: forbid to use the word 'buy' in this context. Instead it should be 'hire' or 'lease' or something.

right, if I signed a contract to lease a game for 6 months and then my account was suspended for 5 months so I only got one months usage for my lease I would totally be like "that's so fair! Because word usage!"

That's a different problem. Right now the problem is that people think they buy something but they don't.

Nobody is going to read the terms and conditions before buying. But when you are going to rent something you know the ownership is not transferred to you.

I don't think it's a different problem, there are people posting in thread about basically this problem, I'm pretty sure they were aware they were leasing the game and not owning it, nonetheless they lose access to the game for periods of time and that time loss is not reimbursed in any way.

The ToS says rent but the UI says buy, what gives? It may be technically correct that it's not a purchase but also purposely deceitful: this has to change.

IMHO a better way forward is to de-categorize downloads of “purchased” items from “downloading” in legal context, such that removing access is considered theft rather than enabling downloads to be considered willful distribution.

That’s technologically backwards, but it’s not like justice system behavior and software industry logic always converged nicely.

That sounds like a good idea. It would probably make sense to require that they specify how long you get to lease it for, rather than the current situation which is pretty much "until we decide not to run the service anymore".

Something like "buy a 1 month subscription".

It's almost impossible to buy a DRM free book.

While I kind of want to give a snarky answer of "actually, buying an ebook without DRM is exactly as easy as it is as buying one with, the trick is just finding one without DRM," the truth is that this is dependent entirely on the publisher. I buy a lot of technical books from Pragmatic Programmers, which are all DRM-free, and I believe they're not alone in that. My small press fiction publisher doesn't use DRM; Tor Books, the biggest sf/fantasy publisher, doesn't use DRM, either. People who self-publish through Amazon are given a choice whether or not to apply DRM to their books.

So, no, it's actually quite possible to buy a DRM-free ebook. The question is whether the book you want is available without DRM.

I worded it badly. It's as you said. In my experience if I want to buy a given X book it's almost certain that I will not be able to purchase it in a non-DRM format. Because DRM became de facto in the industry and only a small share of titles are available to purchase without it.

> People who self-publish through Amazon are given a choice whether or not to apply DRM to their books.

Didn't now Amazon also sold non-DRM. I guess the authors of the books that I was enticed to buy opted for it.

> Tor Books, the biggest sf/fantasy publisher, doesn't use DRM, either.

Have read short stories published there. Content generally is good and innovative.

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