SoylentNews

Celestial [soylentnews.org] writes:

A pair of law school researchers studied online consumers and reached the conclusion that consumers believe that they have more rights to digital media than they actually do [teleread.com].

Called “What We Buy When We ‘Buy Now,’” the study of almost 1,300 online consumers divided its participants into four groups, presenting each of the four with a different purchase option from a fictitious Internet retail store: a “buy now” button for digital media, a “license now” button for digital media, a notice listing the various things they could and couldn’t do with the digital media, and a “buy now” button for physical media. Afterward, the participants answered some questions about what rights they believed they had in the media they bought: the rights to keep, sell, gift, lend, copy, etc. said media.

The results are too complex to describe in any great detail here, but in brief, customers presented with all three digital media purchase options by and large believed they had considerably greater ownership rights in their digital media than they actually do, though the ones who got the list of rights had the lowest level of misunderstanding. Conversely, the people who bought the physical media had the best understanding of the rights they had in it, but many of them believed they had fewer rights than they did. The researchers concluded that getting online stores to move to a rights list rather than a misleading “buy now” button would work best from a standpoint of reducing those misunderstandings.

Another part of the report looked at how much consumers value these ownership rights, and whether they would be willing to pay extra for them. It concluded that many consumers do value ownership rights enough to pay extra for them, and would use streaming services or even illegal peer-to-peer to obtain media instead of “buying” it if such rights were not provided. This doesn’t surprise me—though the article didn’t discuss the particular illegality of breaking DRM, I know many people already do that in the name of exercising greater “ownership” rights over their digital media. But even digital media that are provided free of DRM by the seller often have license terms that say purchasers are not permitted to transfer them, even if the lack of DRM isn’t stopping them.

An abstract of the sixty page summary can be found here [ssrn.com].

Original Submission