you don't own anything you bought digitally

the "buy" button is a lie. has been for years. you click it, your card gets charged, and you walk away thinking you own something. you don't. you bought a license that a company can revoke, modify, or just quietly delete whenever they feel like it.

and the examples keep piling up.

movies and tv

warner bros deleted content from users' digital libraries without warning. sony removed purchased films from playstation accounts in germany and austria because a licensing deal expired. that's it. no refund, just gone. amazon got sued over this and their defense was basically "yeah we told you in the terms of service that you're only buying a license." a judge is still deciding if that's good enough.

it's not.

books

amazon removed the option to download kindle books to your pc in february 2025. you used to be able to plug in your kindle, transfer your books to a hard drive, and actually have them. now you can't. everything lives in amazon's cloud, which amazon controls. and this isn't theoretical risk either. in 2009 they remotely deleted copies of 1984 off people's kindles because of a rights dispute. the irony of a company deleting 1984 is so on the nose it hurts. microsoft shut down their entire ebook store in 2019 and every book every person ever bought just disappeared.

games

epic deleted dark and darker from user libraries entirely last year. not just delisted from the store. gone from your account. you paid for it, it's gone. telltale games going under took a bunch of purchases with it. nintendo shutting down the wii u and 3ds eshop killed digital-only titles that can't be bought anywhere else. ubisoft tried to revoke assassin's creed liberation from steam and got massive backlash, but they tried.

there's a whole website called delistedgames.com that tracks games being removed. it gets updated multiple times a week. that's how normal this is.

the pattern

every single one of these companies uses the same playbook. bury the "you're buying a license not a product" disclaimer in the terms of service. use the word "buy" everywhere in their UI. charge you the same price as a physical copy. then when it's convenient for them, pull the rug.

a 2016 study found that most people who click "buy now" on digital content genuinely believe they own it the same way they'd own a book or a dvd. companies know this. the button still says "buy."

california actually passed a law (AB 2426) requiring companies to disclose that digital purchases are licenses, not ownership. amazon updated their kindle store wording to say "you're purchasing a license." that's progress i guess, but it took a law to make them say the obvious thing they've been exploiting for years.

what actually owning something looks like

a physical book can't be remotely deleted. a dvd doesn't stop working because a licensing deal expired. a physical game cartridge from 1994 still runs. the "convenience" of digital came with a massive hidden cost that we just kind of accepted without noticing.

GOG is the one major platform doing it differently. they sell drm-free games, meaning the file is actually yours. no servers, no licenses, no bullshit. there's also stop killing games, a campaign pushing publishers to keep games in a playable state after they drop support, because apparently that needs to be a whole movement now.

the buy button isn't going to change overnight. but maybe stop treating your digital library like it's actually yours, because according to the terms of service you agreed to, it isn't.