Only buy to own
If buying isn’t owning, then piracy isn’t stealing — A.S. about the news that PlaystationNetwork will delete purchased Discovery content after 2023-12-31.
It’s even worse: piracy never was stealing, because the original owned
copy didn’t get taken away. It is illegal copying.
But this — non-consensual expiring of goods you purchased — is
stealing, because the owned copy is taken away.
Except that I’m sure it’s legal, because it’s in the terms of service.
It is legal theft.
Stuff like that is why I mostly buy my books in print nowadays — since the EU Court of Justice ruled in 2019 that I never own an ebook: I just pay for the right to receive communications.
If buying isn’t owning, why buy?
I decided to only buy to own.
If you can’t re-sell it, you don’t own it.
If you cannot pass it on to your kids, you don’t own it.1
If someone wants me to pay for an ebook, I expect at least a creativecommons license. It would have to be really special for me to even pay a cent to not own the book.
Otherwise property turns into rent and the creative becomes a landlord. Who will usually soon hawk the right to my rent to a predatory lessor-corporation.
My kid has been reading hundreds of my up to 30 year old comic books in the past years (German: „Lustige Taschenbücher“). If these had been DRM-shackled digital „perma-rents“, it’s unlikely that any would have survived the three decades so my kids can enjoy them.
Footnotes:
See how many rich people are circumventing inheritance taxes when passing on companies worth millions to billions, while you can’t even know whether you’ll be able to pass on some ebooks, and you see the inequality in law.