Licensed isn't any more made up than buy and rent, all words are made up.
Being able to articulate what exactly you are allowed to do with something you buy is a useful legal fiction, much like property rights, contracts, and all of the other useful legal fictions we enforce on the world.
It would all be fine if instead of "buy", the big yellow button said "License indefinitely, revocable at any time by us or by the people licensing it to us for any or no reason. If you download it, we reserve the right to reach into your device and delete it when we're done licensing it to you."
But people would probably be less likely to push the button, so I guess it's better to lie to customers about what they're paying for.
