There's a lot of lines you can draw like this. Do you own your money, or do you own an obligation made by the fed to all participants in the US economy? Okay,

There's a lot of lines you can draw like this. Do you own your money, or do you own an obligation made by the fed to all participants in the US economy? Okay, so maybe the US dollar is so pervasive that it's "inert" for all intents and purposes as a store of wealth. The less tangible a good is, the more difficult it is to tell who owns it. People do like streaming services, but Apple has to keep the service running, right? There is a non-zero cost to Apple continuing to service relationships with studios and with customers, and they can't really say "this thing in your Apple account will, necessarily, live forever". I think Apple is the most likely company to make good on this sort of promise; in spite of the way they deprecate APIs (which I actually appreciate), they have an immaculate track record of supporting their services and devices. If you buy a DRM-free movie or rip a physical copy, you're getting closer to owning the bits and bytes themselves, but still, really, you own the right to watch the movie in a non-commercial setting, and you now have to figure out how to make it available on your devices. How long am I obligated to continue supporting software I've "let go" to the folks that contracted me? When will my car stop receiving kernel updates? To me, this is a more difficult issue than whether you have to re-purchase (or pirate) games and movies that you already bought.