Extremely long duration != unlimited. Stating "until this person's death" isn't unlimited, it is a very exact end condition which will happen.
A 99 year lease still has an end date on it. These licenses do not have an end date. The only time it is generally supposed to become unavailable is "due to potential content provider licensing restrictions or for other reasons."
Buying a limited license which allows "an indefinite period of time" is still inherently different from renting. It is definitely different from buying a physical good, I do agree. But I still don't seem to be convinced that its "renting" or "leasing".
If Amazon had to put an end date ahead of time on all the movies they listed with "Buy", do you think they'd put that date as 99 years or would they make it more like one year? Personally I'm perfectly fine with the tradeoff that sure, some move I "bought" 15 years ago on Amazon might some day disappear from their service, as I knew it ahead of time that was the trade-off of "buying" a license on their Unbox service versus owning a physical copy of the VHS or DVD at the time. But in the end I felt it was worth the tradeoff for the connivence.
For all we know Amazon may continue on forever, offering some kind of version of its streaming service and continue to offer these movies forever. Its not guaranteed Amazon will lose the rights to some of these movies, its not guaranteed they'll stop offering a streaming service, its not guaranteed they'll eventually be replaced by Walmart which will buy out Weyland-Yutani. There's no real pre-defined end condition to it at all, other than until the rights holders say we can't or until some other situation happens that makes it unavailable.
Its definitely different than owning a physical good, I completely agree. Its still very different from renting or leasing.
Uhm, you are aware that the Kindle license is limited by your death, right? (Outside of Delaware, and maybe a few other places which have passed explicit legislation overriding this to allow for inheritance of ebooks). How is this different in any way from a lifetime lease agreement?
Is it? Where does it say the license terminates at your death? Could you quote it?
It's non-transferable (i.e., can't move it from the account), but it doesn't list death as the end of the license. If a family member of mine dies but has a bunch of "purchased" movies on their account, those licenses don't just disappear. They remain on the account until the account is closed. I don't think the Amazon Terms of Service requires me to have a pulse to continue to have an Amazon account, and the license terms listed in the link I provided above clearly allows family members to access the media licensed to my account as long as it otherwise is allowed under the above terms, which never references death.
I don't see any reason why my spouse wouldn't be able to access Super Troopers on my Amazon account purchased back when the service was Amazon Unbox after my death, assuming Amazon still has a streaming service, and they still have the rights to stream that movie on the platform, etc. If I'm wrong, please feel free to point it out to me on the Amazon ToS.
>It’s non-transferable (i.e., can’t move it from the account), but it doesn’t list death as the end of the license.
Non-transferable doesn’t mean “can’t move from the account”, it means “legally belongs to the original person to whom it is issued, and cannot be transferred to another person”. Transfer by inheritance at death is…still transfer. A non-transferrable license expires when the entity to whom it was issued ceases to legally exist.
> It’s non-transferable (i.e., can’t move it from the account), but it doesn’t list death as the end of the license.
They don’t need to, since the underlying general law requires you to be alive to legally exist and have property rights in anything, including an Amazon account (unless you are a special entity created by law, like a corporation, which has its own rules.)
> How is this different in any way from a lifetime lease agreement?
It’s different from a lifetime lease in that there is nothing to revert. The subject of the lease is not an enduring, rivalrous “thing” (tangible or intangible) which is returned to the owner, it is a use permission which is extinguished.
