In What We Buy When We “Buy Now”, a paper forthcoming in The University of Pennsylvania Law Review, respected copyright scholars Aaron Perzanowski and Chris Jay Hoofnagle report on an experiment they set up to test what people clicking the “buy now” button on stores selling digital things (ebooks, games, music, videos, etc) think they get for their money – it’s not what they think.
The researchers set up their own storefront, selling digital and physical, and had 1299 experimental subjects make purchases on the store. Then they interviewed the purchases about what they thought they’d got for their money, and contrasted it with the normal deal from this kind of store.
When it came to physical goods, the shoppers pretty much knew exactly what they thought they were getting. But when it came to digital goods, there was a violent mismatch between what the customers thought they were buying (something they could resell, lend, or give away) and what the small print said they were getting (an extremely limited copyright license that required them to use their media in conjunction with special restrictive players that prohibited all these activities).
The confusion stems from the word “buy” in “buy now.” Buy has a widely agreed-upon meaning: to purchase clear title to something. When you buy a car, it’s yours. When you buy a shirt, it’s yours. When you “buy” an ebook, you’re actually taking a one-sided, limited license. It’s not surprising that purchasers would be confused.
Of course, there’s a simple solution to this: the FTC could require that companies only use the word “buy” for things that you’re, you know,buying. For everything else, merchants would have to make buttons that said, “Take a limited license now!”
Chances are fewer people would click that button. That’s the point: people are buying things because they have mistaken beliefs about what they’re getting, and if they knew better, they wouldn’t buy those things on those terms. That’s exactly the situation the FTC exists to remedy.
