It is worth noting that when I buy a physical book, I am not acquiring ownership of the text. I do not have the right to do with the text what I please (e.g. make copies & distribute). The same goes for music. The same goes for software.
What the format (digital+DRM vs. physical) makes possible is more fine grained control by the owner (or their proxy) of the work.
You seem to imply that technological advances have made new forms of contractual agreements about property possible that are not covered well by existing concepts such as "buy" and "lease" and that therefore to extend the meaning of "buy" to cover app store or kindle purchases is reasonable rather than fraudulent.
What an app store or kindle "purchase" provides you with is exactly a lease. You gain a temporary right to utilize a resource (such as a particular physical or digital copy of a work) subject to various restrictions.
By contrast property rights always imply the ability to transfer (via sale, inheritance or gift or voluntary abandonment) as well as to in fact not transfer. Both of which are fundamentally lost here. You can't sell your kindle ebooks, pass them on to your children or even keep them if Amazon decides otherwise (as in the case of 1984).
And there is absolutely no technical or economic reason you can't inherit or sell a DRM protected work.
> You seem to imply that technological advances have made new forms of contractual agreements about property possible that are not covered well by existing concepts such as “buy” and “lease” and that therefore to extend the meaning of “buy” to cover app store or kindle purchases is reasonable rather than fraudulent.
Nope, licenses as a form of intangible personal property long predate the “modern technological advances” being discussed (or, say, the existence of the US, for example), and the meaning of the word “buy” already encompasses buying licenses, which may have a variety of terms, including termination conditions.
It’s just that you seem to be trying to falsely generalize the specialized meaning of “buy” that applies when the object of the purchase is an item of tangible personal property to things which are not tangible personal property.
Do you have a good example of a pre-digital private everyday transaction where people would use "buy" to refer to entering in some complex licensing arrangement which did not grant any transferable rights?
What you write is true and I see where you are coming from. But my contention is that what you refer to as the "specialized meaning of buy" was pretty much the only meaning an average person would have used it in. And that such a person's reasonable and natural assumption when first confronted with a "buy" button for an ebook would be that it pressing it would confer analogous rights of transfer as buying the physical copy. And furthermore that courts and regulators allowing this assumption to be violated was a major oversight. If for no other reason than that it is foolish to the extreme to bring about a system where a single dominant entity having a bad day could in a blink wipe out a large fraction of accessible books.
What the format (digital+DRM vs. physical) makes possible is more fine grained control by the owner (or their proxy) of the work.