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zoom6628 parent
Can't Amazon be sued for false advertising by having "buy" on the button when it is actually "rent"? #justasking genuine question on interpretation of the term in USA.
probably_wrong
Someone is doing that right now - there's a proposed class-action lawsuit [1] that reads in part "On its website, Defendant tells consumers the option to ‘buy’ or ‘purchase’ digital copies of these audiovisual works. But when consumers ‘buy’ digital versions of audiovisual works through Amazon’s website, they do not obtain the full bundle of sticks of rights we traditionally think of as owning property. Instead, they receive ‘non-exclusive, nontransferable, non-sublicensable, limited license’ to access the digital audiovisual work, which is maintained at Defendant’s sole discretion".

[1] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/08/i-like-plaintiffs-ch...

Andrex
You're buying a license. (Was hard not to use scare quotes here.)
latexr
And while you’re at it, do you expect to sue Steam, and the App Stores, and most other digital marketplaces owned by billionaire corporations? You’re not going to win those lawsuits with such a flimsy argument.

They could just as well argue that you are not buying the book, but a license to access it under certain conditions. A movie theatre is a comparable example: You say you bought a ticket, not that you rented access to the movie, but it’s only valid for one specific viewing despite being a sale.

reassess_blind
A movie theatre is a bad comparison. Nowhere does it say “Buy the movie” and it’s clear to the purchaser that they’re purchasing a one time viewing. That’s not the case with an Amazon eBook where the marketing and reasonable expectation of the average consumer is they’re buying the eBook itself.

Not that I necessarily agree with the other comment either.

globular-toast
Exactly. The button should just say "read on Kindle" or "watch on Prime" etc. Including the word "buy" is at best misleading and at worst deceptive.
latexr
> That’s not the case with an Amazon eBook where the marketing and reasonable expectation of the average consumer is they’re buying the eBook itself.

Good luck proving that in court without reasonable doubt.

Look at the image again. It’s extremely vague about what you are in fact buying.

https://blog.pixelmelt.dev/content/images/2025/10/image.png

reassess_blind
Whether it’s correct, and whether you can argue it in court against a multi-trillion dollar company’s legal team are indeed two very different things.

I wouldn’t be confident in court, but I would be confident that most users expect that ebooks they “bought” in the past could be viewed on their new Kobo eBook reader.

latexr
> Whether it’s correct, and whether you can argue it in court against a multi-trillion dollar company’s legal team are indeed two very different things.

Exactly. And because this conversation started because someone was asking about suing them, what you can argue in court is what matters for this thread.

I don’t agree with what Amazon is doing and thus don’t buy DRM ebooks from them, but that’s beside the point of the argument.

> I wouldn’t be confident in court

Which was my argument. Everything else you added were tangential arguments no one was refuting in the first place.

> but I would be confident that most users expect that ebooks they “bought” in the past could be viewed on their new Kobo eBook reader.

You think most people who buy books for ereaders expect that when they buy a book for Kindle, they can just load it up on their Kobo? I wouldn’t be that confident without a survey, but I would welcome seeing one.

People don’t seem to have trouble understanding that when you buy an app on iOS, that doesn’t work on Android, and vice-versa. It is plausible they might have the same intuitive understanding regarding the Kindle and Kobo stores.

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