I doubt the law requires anything more than the full refund which MS is providing.

Similarly, if someone sells you a physical product that is faulty, the seller is not required to produce a replacement, they can just refund you instead.

> the seller is not required to produce a replacement

As well they cannot demand any such thing - the country's money is legislated to be accepted as a settlement for any kind of debt. It's the "legal tender" thing.

Defective instances are a random (though not unpredictable) event occurring independently between instances, with no influence by the manufacturer, designholder, or vendor.

Hitting the Molly Switch on a DRM service is the exact opposite.

The UK Consumer Rights Act (CRA) appears to anticipate this as it has no absolute date beyond which goods should remain suitable for purpose.

Digital goods should last infinitely, so a digital good that 'expires' should be fixed or the cost fully refunded (fully as there are still an infinite number of years of use left available; and that should be accounting for inflation too).

They are fully refunding all purchases, though.

I don't understand how publishers are going to continue pushing DRMed media if they have to keep every sale as a liability on their books.

I feel the legality should surround the description. This isn't "selling" it's "lending".

You probably only obtain a license to read a book and don't actually own it, similar to streaming movies & music.

"and you will receive a full refund of the original purchase price."

Seems fair enough to me.

That's like saying the car factory is allowed to take an old timer from you if they refund its original price.

Can I use the money to buy the same book? Is my time lost searching for this replacement worth nothing? If I added annotations, do they end up in the new book? If you answer any of these questions with 'no', its not fair enough.

That analogy is loaded because classic cars appreciate. Ebooks don’t. Toyota can feel to take back my 03 4Runner for the original purchase price.

Ebooks can appreciate.

You could have originally bought it on sell and that sell is no longer available.

You could have added value to the ebook by way of adding annotations.

The ebook could have had better display than its competitors, if it and all other equal quality displays vanished, they are now very rare. Someone would be willing to pay more than your original purchase price if they could now get that display experience.

So can I reverse any contract at anytime or is this something only large companies are allowed to do and only to consumers?

What's the definition of "fair" here? There are many scenarios under which that makes no sense. Is the price inflation adjusted? What if the currency in question tanked in the mean time? What about actual labor done on the copy (annotations, notes, ...). Not faulting Microsoft, but we really need to rethink this model.

Only that I wanted the books, not the money.

Use the money to buy the book again.

Let's just wait for who's it gonna be! And how will it look when "books stop working".