If you’ve ever scoured Amazon for the hot new release (say, Emily Henry’s newest romance novel), you are probably paying more attention to the price and format selections than the purchase button. It’s unlikely that the phrase, “Buy now with 1-Click,” raises any red flags – but it should. Because like so many doomed love affairs, it’s based on a big, fat lie.
What you’re paying for when you “buy” a Kindle e-book isn’t actually a copy of said book; it’s permission to download and access the work under terms defined wholly by Amazon, under parameters defined solely by Amazon, only so long as Amazon feels like making it available. The first (and arguably most on-the-nose) illustration of this happened when, in 2009, Amazon remotely deleted copies of George Orwell’s 1984 off customers’ Kindles following a complaint by the Orwell estate. To paraphrase a TV legend, “That’s not very romance.”
Companies are lying to you when they claim to “sell” you digital things, and that needs to stop. In February – following news that Amazon had disabled customers’ ability to back up their Kindle libraries to external thumb drives – Senator Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) sent a letter to the Federal Trade Commission asking it to stop companies from using bait-and-switch tactics that imply ownership of digital products. Today, Public Knowledge and the Internet Archive, along with 16 other civil society organizations, endorsed Wyden’s letter and called on the FTC to establish clear ground rules for digital ownership and sales of goods. To truly own something, consumers need the right to preserve, use, and transfer their goods. Without these abilities (which we’re calling the “PUT” framework), you don’t really own something in any meaningful sense of the word because you cannot control what happens to the products you thought you were buying.
There’s also been momentum at the state level to clarify what consumers are actually paying for when accessing digital content. California’s AB 2426, which took effect on January 1 of 2025, requires companies selling digital goods to California consumers to clearly disclose when consumers are paying for a revocable license, rather than ownership of a particular good. This bill also forces retailers like Amazon to provide easy access to the license terms so that consumers can understand what they’re actually paying for.
But that “Buy Now” button is emblematic of a lot of problems all at once. Besides the obvious fact that companies are lying to you when it comes to digital products, this button highlights another core issue: you don’t actually own most of what you pay for online. Like many problems online, this is a side effect of archaic copyright laws, but the problems they create are very real, and very widespread. Lack of digital ownership is why libraries are stuck paying extortionate rates to acquire and lend e-books. It’s what allows technology companies to drop support for “smart” devices and allows car companies to charge subscription fees for heated seats. It’s why your entire media library exists at the whims of fickle media executives and why we need to ask the Copyright Office every three years for permission to fix ice cream machines.
We cannot keep going down the path of endlessly paying for things we don’t own. We call upon the FTC to define digital ownership, and let Americans go back to what we love: buying stuff.