Aaron Perzanowski and Chris Jay Hoofnagle, What We Buy When We Buy Now, 165 University of Pennsylvania Law Review (forthcoming 2017), available at SSRN. In their forthcoming article, What We Buy When We Buy Now, Aaron Perzanowski and Chris Jay Hoofnagle richly capture today’s digital media marketplace and rightly raise concerns about consumers’ understanding of their legal rights upon licensing a book, movie, or song. They focus upon vendors’ use of the language ‘buy now’ on their websites and test consumer comprehension of this language empirically. The results, showing, for example, that 83% of respondents believed they ‘owned’ their media, certainly raise alarms. The article proposes a sensible and inexpensive solution, supported by the authors’ empirical evidence, that would help clear up the ‘buy now’ confusion, namely ‘adding a short notice to a digital product page that outlines consumer rights’. I enthusiastically recommend this article for anyone interested in twenty-first century digital commerce … (more)
[Robert Hillman, JOTWELL, 10 October]
First posted 2016-10-10 13:36:12
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