When you click buy on a digital copy of a song or movie, do you really own it?

From American Public Media, this is Marketplace Tech. I'm Novosafo.

There's a new class action lawsuit against Amazon Prime video that's once again

elevating the question of ownership in the digital age. Who actually owns a movie, a song, a

video game? Buy a physical copy, a CD or DVD, and the answer is obvious. Buy a digital copy,

and the answer gets very complicated.

To learn more, we turn to Aaron Berzenowski, a law professor at the University of Michigan,

and author of the book, The End of Ownership.

You know, for hundreds of years, we had like a really clear idea of what it means to buy something in the kind of physical world, right?

If you buy it, you own it, you get to keep it as long as you want, you get to give it away. Then software

comes in and we start seeing these licenses and that really changes the circumstances, I think,

in really important ways. So rather than ownership, what you get is permission, right? You get the

right to do certain things with the product, but get is permission, right? You get the right to do certain things

with the product, but not other things, right? So software companies, right, might distinguish

between personal use or professional use, right? So we get a blurring of this line between a sale

in the traditional sense and a license. And that's what I think consumers

are really struggling to navigate today because a license doesn't mean any one particular set of

rights. It means whatever the person offering you this content, this digital media, whatever set of rights they decide to include in that bundle.

And I think that creates a lot of uncertainty for everyday consumers.

So right now when we buy a movie or a song, generally speaking, we're buying a license to view it or listen to it as much as we want?

Generally, that is the structure that we see in the marketplace.

And that's become for digital assets, video games, e-books, digital music, digital movies, and television shows.

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