Is Ownership Over?
your digital possessions are revocable and subject to revision at any moment. how did we get here?
It’s 2009. The bedside lamp’s warm, incandescent glow spreads a soft light over the master bedroom. Your wife breathes quietly next to you, already asleep. You’ve been reading through a list of modern “classics” — on tonight’s docket is a continuation of your dystopian journey through Orwell’s 1984. You power up your nifty new Kindle, navigate to the library section, and are hit with a sense of puzzled unease. Where is 1984? You page back and forth, confused, unable to find the title. Annoyed, blaming your own incompetence and muttering about the temperamentality of emerging tech, you flick the light off and go to sleep.
The next day, you discover 1984 was, due to an arcane licensing dispute, remotely and unceremoniously deleted from all Kindle devices. At the time, Animal Farm faced the same fate.
These revocations of “purchased” media, paired with instances of top-down digital revisionism, have since only accelerated. When Microsoft closed its eBook store in 2019, all purchased books were wiped (and locally inaccessible due to Digital Rights Management (DRM) restrictions, software-based authentication tech). In 2022, PlayStation deleted purchased downloads of movies like John Wick and Paddington from users’ libraries. That same year, Amazon Prime removed purchased episodes of Adult Swim’s “Final Space” from user accounts. Ubisoft rendered fully-paid-for copies of its game The Crew, both physical and digital, unplayable in 2024. Disney has continuously modified and censored legally available versions of countless movies and TV shows, including Aladdin, Bluey, and many more. Digital copies of literary works by Roald Dahl, Agatha Christie, and R. L. Stine have received ideologically motivated alterations, changing the content of readers’ preexisting libraries without their consent.
Orwell’s 1984 famously depicted a world in which “nothing was your own except the few cubic centimeters inside your skull.” This lack of individual ownership is a predicament from which modern western society, on the surface, appears immune. The cautionary citation of Orwell in this context may even come off as tritely neurotic: we are brazenly capitalistic, heavily invested in the idea of consumerism as an expression of personal agency, and providing growing swaths of people with the economic means to accrue mountains of “stuff.” Calls for collective ownership, a sly euphemism for the coercive redistribution of individual possessions, echo primarily from callow coastal grad students and toxic zealots eager to take another swing at communism. How is it possible, then, that major classes of first-world ownership will soon become entirely obsolete? And that in many respects, unbelievably, we have already become glassy-eyed renters paying full price for the cheap illusion of ownership?
The longstanding (and accelerating) transition from physical to digital media is as obvious as it is ubiquitous. Books became cloud-controlled text files, CDs became Spotify, DVDs became Netflix, and video game cartridges became Steam libraries. Compounding this format change, however, is its natural and more insidious complement — we no longer own anything we “purchase.” You, the new 21st century serf, are afflicted with a false sense of proprietary control over the art and media you hold dear.
We’ve already seen that digital libraries of eBooks, movies, TV shows, and video games are vulnerable to deletion and insidious alteration. And if Spotify shut down tomorrow, or launched a censorship campaign, would you even remember all the songs you’ve lost access to? Lil Darkie, a controversial musical and visual artist with millions of fans, had his music temporarily removed from Spotify in 2019 after being deemed offensive. The album artwork for his track “HOLOCAUST” remains absent from the platform. And as Pirate Wires covered in 2023, when Google began purging (potentially millions of) old Gmail accounts and their associated data, petabytes of images, video, and text exchanges — often important records of our personal memories — this can all be snapped out of existence by cloud providers if not locally backed up.
If a piece of content is digital, even if you “bought it,” your access to it can likely be permanently revoked without notice or consent. Even files that exist locally on your devices are often subject to DRM controls, rendering them useless without proper licensing permissions. Because, often put legally and explicitly, you do not own any of these things. You are paying for temporary access to content, the availability and substance of which are subject to the mercurial whims of corporate providers.
Why has the digitalization trend led to this crisis of diminishing ownership rights? Basic market incentives dictate, as a point of anti-piracy, that purchased media be difficult to redistribute. The financial importance of such restrictions correlates inversely with reproduction and distribution costs (e.g. this mattered very little with vinyl but was industry-shattering with MP3s) because cheap copying and easy sharing eliminate scarcity. As software continues to devour the world, and everything that can be offloaded into the cloud is offloaded into the cloud, the consequences of anti-piracy initiatives get baked into increasingly broader cross-sections of societal ownership. In this way, digitalization is quietly destabilizing the structural building blocks of both our personal nostalgias and our collective, media-milestoned cultural history.
Video games, in many ways at the forefront of this trend, serve as a canary in the coal mine. Roughly 90 percent of all video games are now purchased as digital licenses, with disks and cartridges increasingly relegated to the realm of collectors’ items. Even so-called physical purchases are little more than glorified QR codes — Nintendo’s “Game-Key Cards”, a 2025 initiative for its new Switch 2 console, don’t actually have the game on them. They are simply license containers that provide access to a digital download (and must remain inserted during gameplay). Capcom, one of the biggest and longest-standing game publishers, officially stated that it will not even count these Game-Key Card sales as “physical” revenue, despite the cartridges being physical items that are sold in physical retail boxes in brick-and-mortar stores. Publishers and gamers alike have pushed back on the concept of Game-Key Cards, revealing a misalignment of incentives between makers, consumers, and corporate providers.
The latest versions of the Xbox Series S and PS5 Pro do not even include optical disk drives at all. Avowed, one of Microsoft’s biggest 2025 Xbox and PC game titles, launched with a Premium Edition SteelBook (a $95 package marketed as a “physical” edition) that contained a digital access code instead of a disk (alongside various collectible trinkets). In fact, almost all physical PC games available for purchase at retail stores now contain nothing more than a printed redemption code for a download license.
In many ways, the instant convenience of digitalization is fantastic, but it comes with significant drawbacks. PlayStation is a representative example. Their Software Product License Agreement states that “all software products” on your consoles are “licensed to you, not sold.” To boot, per the PSN (PlayStation Network) TOS, any “content provided through PSN is licensed on a non-exclusive and revocable basis to you.” Revocable is the key word there — in late 2023, after a licensing lapse with Discovery, PlayStation removed over 1,000 television shows from users’ libraries — including purchased material. In a statement, PlayStation noted “you will no longer be able to watch any of your previously purchased Discovery content, and the content will be removed from your video library.”
While a new licensing deal later saved the catalogue, this is not an isolated incident. In 2022, PlayStation conducted the same sort of culling with StudioCanal movie purchases, and titles like John Wick, The Hunger Games, Paddington, and Sicario were summarily removed from users’ libraries. Amazon Prime conducted a similar purge with Adult Swim’s “Final Space” after Warner Bros. Discovery somehow used its removal as part of a byzantine tax write-off strategy. The specifics here may seem like small potatoes, but the broader implications are critical: in the era of mass digitalization, your possessions (which, again, you do not “own”) can simply be taken from you.
In early 2024, Ubisoft’s Director of Subscriptions expressed hope that gamers would eventually start “feeling comfortable with not owning your game.” A few months later, when servers for a Ubisoft game called The Crew were deactivated, the company removed fully-paid-for copies of that game from players’ libraries. The game could not be re-downloaded or re-installed, and copies that somehow avoided deletion were rendered unplayable. As more and more games go online-only, requiring companies to maintain active servers, this practice will become increasingly common.
When Google Stadia (the company’s gaming service) shut down in 2023, all game access, unexported save progress, and accounts were revoked (though Google did offer extensive refunds and transfer opportunities prior to the sunsetting). When the Nintendo Wii and 3DS eShops closed in 2023, while no existing digital copies were deleted, new access to thousands of games was lost forever. Many of these titles were never made available in physical versions, and no other legal storefront exists to offer them digitally. Troves of human creativity were lost forever to time.
October 2024, likely in response to California passing AB 2426 (a law requiring digital storefronts to disclose that customers are paying only for revocable licenses), Valve added a note to the Steam checkout process explaining that gamers are receiving only “a license for the product on Steam” in return for their hard-earned cash. Steam support has also reiterated that none of these licenses are transferable, going so far as to explicitly confirm that neither games nor accounts can be “transferred via a will.” When you die, your thousands of dollars of Steam games die with you, posterity be damned! And even if you extract all of your game files and put them on local drives, those pesky DRM measures (barring legally questionable and temperamental workarounds) will render them unplayable.
None of this, of course, is limited to the realm of gaming. And while the nature of the threats posed by digitalization and revisionism are not necessarily “new,” having emerged alongside the domination of software, their ubiquitous (and growing) scope of applicability is creating a ticking time bomb, arming a powerful set of levers ripe for misuse or mundane enforcement of a “new normal.” When Amazon (ironically) deleted 1984 and Animal Farm from Kindles in 2009, they established unequivocally that your property exists at their discretion. More recently, as previously covered on Pirate Wires, extensive edits — sometimes silently and without the authors’ consent — have been pushed by publishers to the works of Roald Dahl, Agatha Christie, R. L. Stine, and more. This in turn established that the nature of your property, in addition to your ability to access it, is subject to change at any moment.
In 2019, when Microsoft shut down its eBook store, all of its users’ purchased books were deleted (though refunds were provided) and local copies became inaccessible because the book files relied on Microsoft’s DRM system. Amazon’s Kindle books are protected with a similar system, and the company removed its “Download & Transfer via USB” web option in February 2025 to make DRM removal more difficult. Your digital library of books, much like your other digital libraries, guarantees you neither content permanence nor perennial access.
The threats of revocation and alteration create a dangerous combination whose potency increases with time. As technology improves the ability to remotely alter, police, and replace distributed content, as shifting cultural predilections increase incentives to retroactively “fix” old content, and as the natural entropy of time leads to the closure of various online libraries and the decay of physical storage, original backups and potential access points will grow increasingly scarce.
Disney’s Fantasia serves as a perfect early example of this confluence of factors. The 1940 animated classic originally featured a black centaur named “Sunflower” whose depiction was later deemed racially problematic. She was removed entirely from the film, absent first in a 1969 theatrical re-release and later (with varying degrees of editing sophistication) from all VHS, DVD, and Blu-ray releases post-1991. If not for the obsessive work of a very small handful of archival preservationists online, folks like Class316 on Internet Archive and “Official business” (4.06k subscribers) on YouTube who uncovered and modernized now-ancient physical source material in order to create accessible versions of Fantasia as it was first envisioned, an important piece of art and cultural history may have been effectively erased from the world! Disney is constantly quietly censoring its content, from Aladdin to The Goofy Movie to Deadpool to Bluey. What happens when future works like Fantasia are available from one central source, DMCA’d elsewhere, and never produced in a physical version? The lack of ownership inherent in the digitalization movement highlights the extremely tenuous nature of our link to the media and cultural realities of the not-so-distant past. Are we truly dependent on piracy and hobbyists?
As the line separating the physical and digital worlds continues to blur, one can imagine the degradation of ownership and control reaching far beyond the realm of media. In fact, early attempts to digitally neuter physical possessions are already here. BMW tried paywalling seat heaters (before facing insane backlash), Tesla puts software-limited acceleration boosts behind a paywall and disables paid-for Full Self-Driving features after certain resales, and Mercedes, Toyota, GM, and Volkswagen all remotely hamstring features to charge subscription access. Ford even filed a patent for the remote disabling of air conditioning, locking of doors, playing of horrible and incessant sounds in the car, and the physical autonomous moving of the car (ostensibly for cases of missed payments). Anything with software-dependent functionality and internet access can, in theory, begin looking more like something you license and less like something you own.
The lack of extant media ownership described here may appear trivial at surface level. But we, fellow new-age serfs, are the frogs sitting comfortably in a pleasantly warm pot on its way to a searing boil, growing eerily comfortable with our exchange of control and ownership for immediacy and convenience. Whether this piece represents a call to action or a premature dirge to ownership is uncertain. It seems increasingly possible, however, that the famous and often-paraphrased “you will own nothing, and you will be happy” refrain that emerged from laughably dystopian World Economic Forum content in 2016 was wrong in its explanation but directionally correct in its conclusion. Will the company behind your future Brain-Computer Interface deprecate older versions, rendering you incapacitated until your family can afford the upgrade? What if the company goes under completely, shutting down its servers and requiring you to switch hardware providers? Does that mean another unavoidable (and costly) brain surgery in order to access your own mind?
When the math PhDs finally do manage to distill and upload your consciousness to the cloud, remember that you’re probably just paying for a revocable license.