They were never "purchases" and it's more that the terminology has been faulty and misleading, more so than the business model.

The rank-and-file consumer wanted to believe that "purchasing" something was permanent, but the metaphor is leaky. If I purchase a table from Ikea, then I take the kit home, I assemble it, I store the table, I maintain the table, I clean the table, and I can keep the table around for as long as I can pay rent on the apartment or whever it's being housed.

The same goes for a CD or DVD: you can keep playing it as long as YOU store it, YOU clean it, and YOU have a machine that can decode and reproduce the content.

But with digital intangibles in the cloud, none of this holds true. Your "purchase" belongs to Chad and it's in Chad's garage:

https://m.xkcd.com/1150/

So how can you be sore when Chad tires of the sweet deal you cooked up?

The same type of leaky metaphor happens with "piracy-as-theft". You copied some content and stole it! No it's not stolen: stealing is depriving a rightful owner of property. The rightful owner (or copyright holder) can calculate all their lost revenue and try to hold you accountable for that, but with piracy and copying, nobody's deprived of the content itself. Some cultures accept copying and plagiarism as a great honor and compliment to the original authors...

Sony chose to use the words "purchase" and "buy" on their pages, and hide some sneaky text in the EULA that changes their definition to remove the implication of ownership.

They know that using terms like "rent" or "lease indefinitely" would reduce their revenue, so they squirrel away legal gotchas that no one ever reads to cover their arse. It shouldn't be allowed.

Just because something is legal doesn't make it ethical. Sometimes the ethical thing to do is ignore the legalities, which is why people are fine with advocating for piracy in cases like these.

I argue that the idea of copyright of intellectual property was a social compact, and this violates it; These are not "copies" in the common vernacular, they're a temporary viewing of a spectacle, and do not deserve protection against replication, especially nonprofit replication.

> They were never "purchases" and it's more that the terminology has been faulty and misleading, more so than the business model.

They were advertised as purchases. That they were not in actuality has a name: fraud.

> But with digital intangibles in the cloud, none of this holds true. Your "purchase" belongs to Chad and it's in Chad's garage:

> https://m.xkcd.com/1150/

> So how can you be sore when Chad tires of the sweet deal you cooked up?

Except in the cartoon Chad wasn't paid, whereas in the real life example Sony was. So a more true analogy would be that Chad sold you a fishing rod; you thought it was a purchase and you owned it, and then one day he took it back off you and pointed to the small print you didn't read that stated he could do this.