The Death of Ownership
What it means that you no longer own the things you pay for, and what to do about it
There used to be a simple test for whether you owned something. You paid for it, it came home with you, and nobody could take it back without breaking the law. You could keep it, sell it, lend it to your brother-in-law, throw it in a drawer for twenty years, or run it over with a truck. Nobody needed your permission to do any of that, because permission wasn’t the point. The point was that it was yours.
That test is disappearing, on purpose, one product category at a time. It’s disappearing in video games, where Sony and Nintendo have spent the last several years quietly walking away from physical media. It’s disappearing in books, movies, and music, where “purchase” now means “revocable license” and the fine print says so in plain English if you bother to read it. It’s disappearing in cars, where a feature that is bolted into the vehicle at the factory can be switched off by a server in Munich until you agree to pay a monthly fee to switch it back on. It’s disappearing in farm equipment, where a broken sensor on a combine can leave a man standing in his own field, staring at a $500,000 machine he is not permitted to fix. And it’s under quiet pressure in housing, where a growing share of the single-family home stock in some markets has become a financial instrument for a small number of large institutional owners rather than shelter that a family holds free and clear.
None of this happened by accident. Ownership is inconvenient for the modern balance sheet. A thing you own is a thing a company only gets to sell you once. A thing you rent, license, or subscribe to is a thing a company gets to sell you forever, and can take back the moment the terms stop being profitable. The shift from owning to licensing isn’t a technology story. It’s a business model story, dressed up in the language of convenience, and it has been remarkably successful because most people never read the paperwork until the day the thing they thought they owned stops working, disappears from their library, or gets a bill attached to it that wasn’t there yesterday.
This piece is about why that shift matters, why the video game industry is the clearest and most instructive example of it, and what an individual person can actually do about a trend that looks, from where most of us are standing, unstoppable.
It is worth saying plainly, before going further, that this is not a complaint about capitalism, markets, or the profit motive itself. Companies exist to make money, and there is nothing wrong with that. The problem here is narrower and more specific: a business practice that quietly redefines what “buying” a thing means, without the buyer’s informed consent, in a way that transfers risk from the seller to the customer after the money has already changed hands. A farmer who buys a tractor should get a tractor, not a decade-long service relationship with a locked-out diagnostic port. A reader who buys a book should get a book, not a revocable license dressed up in the language of a sale. The dishonesty in the transaction, not the existence of the transaction, is the actual complaint.
It isn’t unstoppable. But stopping it, or even just slowing it down, is not going to come from Sacramento or Brussels. It’s going to come from people making different choices with their own money, forming the habits and small institutions that keep ownership alive at the local level, and refusing to treat “convenient” and “good” as the same word.
Sony, Nintendo, and the quiet death of the disc
Start with the numbers, because the numbers tell the story better than any press release ever will.
In the United States, spending on physical video game software peaked in 2008 at $11.6 billion. By 2025, it had fallen to roughly $1.5 billion, the lowest level recorded since tracking began in 1995, an 87 percent collapse from peak. The steepest single-year drop came in 2024, when physical spending fell 28 percent in twelve months, according to Circana analyst Mat Piscatella, who has tracked the category for years. Globally the story rhymes. Physical game revenue fell roughly 25 percent over three years to about $11 billion in 2024, and on PC, physical media now accounts for about 1 percent of the market. It is, for practical purposes, gone. In the UK, boxed game sales fell 35 percent year over year in 2024 and now make up barely a tenth of new game sales.
That decline was not simply consumers voting with their wallets in a fair fight between two equally available options. It was engineered. Console makers have spent a console generation making the disc-based option progressively less convenient, less complete, and less available, while making the digital option the default, the cheaper option, and eventually, on some hardware, the only option.
Consider what actually happens when you buy a “physical” copy of a big game today. On Nintendo’s new Switch 2, a category of retail product called the Game-Key Card has become common for major third-party releases. The box looks normal. The cartridge looks normal. You take it home, you put it in the console, and the console tells you it now needs to download the actual game over the internet, because the cartridge itself is empty. It’s a key, not a copy. You need an internet connection, you need enough free storage, and you need the servers to still be running, because if Nintendo’s download infrastructure for that title ever goes dark, that “physical” cartridge in your hand becomes an inert piece of plastic with nothing behind it. One enthusiast press outlet summed up the arrangement as managing to combine the worst qualities of physical and digital ownership at once: you still have to carry a cartridge around, and you still don’t actually have the game on it.
Sony’s approach has been more direct: just take the digital purchases back. In 2022, Sony removed hundreds of previously purchased StudioCanal films from PlayStation libraries in Germany and Austria, citing a change in its content licensing arrangements, a year after assuring customers their existing purchases were safe. In December 2023, Sony announced it would delete more than 1,300 seasons of Discovery programming, including Deadliest Catch and MythBusters, from every customer’s library on December 31 of that year, “due to our content licensing arrangements with content providers.” No offer of a refund, no equivalent replacement, just a sentence thanking customers for their continued support on the way out the door. Sony reversed course after the backlash reached the New York Times and California’s legislature, but the reversal was a public relations decision, not a change in the underlying architecture. The architecture still allows Sony to do this whenever it wants, and in the summer of 2026, Sony did it again, announcing the removal of more than 550 purchased films, including Terminator 2, from customer libraries. There is currently no way to back up a purchased PlayStation video file to any device you control. It exists only where Sony permits it to exist, for exactly as long as Sony permits it.
Ubisoft has provided the cleanest case study of what “always online” actually means for ownership. The Crew, an always-online racing game released in 2014, was delisted from digital storefronts in December 2023 and had its servers shut down entirely by March 2024, a decade after release, rendering the game completely unplayable for everyone who had purchased it, with no refunds offered. Ubisoft’s legal position, stated plainly in court filings, is that customers who bought The Crew never bought a game. They bought a license to access a game, a license Ubisoft was always entitled to revoke. That argument sparked a consumer movement called Stop Killing Games, which has since gathered more than 1.3 million verified signatures on a European Citizens’ Initiative, enough to force a formal review by the European Commission, and has drawn lawsuits in both France and the United States. A French consumer association, UFC-Que Choisir, is now suing Ubisoft directly, arguing the company’s terms are deceptive and its contract clauses abusive. A companion effort in the United States, California’s Protect Our Games Act, which would have required 60 days’ notice before a game’s servers went dark and either an offline mode or a refund, failed in the state senate after industry lobbying, with the Entertainment Software Association reportedly arguing, among other things, that the bill could criminalize hobbyists running private Minecraft servers.
Set aside for a moment whether you have ever played The Crew or care about video games at all. The legal argument being made in that courtroom is the argument being made, in slightly different language, in every industry covered in this piece: you did not buy the thing, you bought temporary permission to use the thing, and the company that sold it to you retains the right to take it back whenever its own business needs change. That argument, if it wins, doesn’t stay contained to video games. It’s a template.
Why any of this matters, beyond nostalgia for game boxes
The easy dismissal here is that this is a hobbyist’s complaint, a bunch of grown men upset about cartridges. That dismissal misses the actual stakes, which have nothing to do with nostalgia and everything to do with what it means to possess something free of anyone else’s continuing say-so.
Physical ownership carries a specific legal protection that digital licensing does not: the first sale doctrine. Once you buy a physical copy of a copyrighted work, you’re free to resell it, lend it, give it away, or destroy it, without asking the copyright holder’s permission and without paying them again. That doctrine is why used bookstores, video rental stores, libraries, and GameStop trade-ins have ever been legal at all. It is a genuinely old idea, dating to a 1908 Supreme Court case, and it exists because the courts long ago recognized that a seller who has already been paid once shouldn’t get to control what happens to an object after it leaves their hands.
There is no equivalent doctrine for digital goods, and courts have been unwilling to invent one. In Capitol Records v. ReDigi, a company that tried to build a legal marketplace for reselling used digital music files was sued out of existence, with the courts ruling that transferring a digital file necessarily involves making a copy, which infringes copyright regardless of whether the original is deleted. The practical result is that a digital purchase can never become a used good. It cannot depreciate gracefully into someone else’s hands the way a paperback or a used car does. It can only be revoked, restricted, or abandoned. Amazon’s own current purchase terms for Kindle books state plainly that a customer is buying a license, not a copy, and that license can be modified or restricted at Amazon’s discretion. Amazon proved this wasn’t hypothetical back in 2009, when it remotely deleted purchased copies of Orwell’s 1984 and Animal Farm from customers’ Kindles over a rights dispute, an irony that has never stopped being pointed out and never stopped being true.
This matters for reasons well beyond the annoyance of losing a book or a movie. A right that depends on someone else’s continued goodwill is not a right. It’s a favor, and favors get withdrawn. When ownership becomes licensing, four things change, quietly, underneath the surface of everyday life.
First, permanence disappears. A thing you own exists on your terms, in your closet, on your shelf, until you decide otherwise. A thing you license exists on the licensor’s terms, subject to a business decision you had no part in and no warning about. Your relationship to your own possessions becomes conditional.
Second, resale and lending disappear. The ability to sell what you no longer want or lend what a friend needs is not a convenience. It’s a form of economic self-sufficiency, a small private safety valve that lets people get value back out of things they paid for, and lets other people get access to those things at a price below retail. Kill the secondary market, and you’ve quietly transferred that value entirely to the manufacturer, who now sells every copy at full price to every buyer, forever, with no leakage.
Third, preservation disappears. When Sony deletes a licensed catalog, or Ubisoft kills a server, or Nintendo’s download infrastructure eventually goes dark on some future console nobody’s built yet, the work in question doesn’t become unavailable in some markets. It stops existing, period, for anyone, unless someone broke the law to preserve a copy beforehand. Culture and history, in a digital-license world, exist entirely at the pleasure of whichever corporation currently holds the rights, and corporations do not have a business incentive to preserve things that aren’t currently profitable.
The scale of that loss, once you go looking for it, is startling. The Video Game History Foundation, working with the Software Preservation Network and researchers at the University of Washington, surveyed a random sample of over 1,500 games released in the United States before 2010 and found that only about 13 percent remained available through any legal, easily accessible channel, whether reissue, remaster, or digital re-release. The other 87 percent are simply gone from the legitimate market, retrievable only through piracy or the increasingly difficult work of keeping decades-old hardware alive. That overall figure puts video games behind the survival rate of American silent films and only slightly ahead of pre-World War II audio recordings, which is a genuinely strange place for a $180 billion industry to find itself. The numbers get worse the further you drill down. Less than 3 percent of games released before 1985 are still in print. Only 4.5 percent of the Commodore 64 library survives commercially. And when Nintendo shut down the 3DS eShop, a single corporate decision to flip a switch on a storefront, it wiped out more than half of all commercially available Game Boy family titles in one stroke, because so much of that catalog’s legal availability existed nowhere but on that one server. This is what a licensing-based economy does to a culture’s own memory of itself over time. It doesn’t destroy the culture all at once. It just quietly stops maintaining the archive, because maintaining an archive of something no longer selling isn’t a line item any shareholder is asking to see funded.
Fourth, and this is the one that matters most for how people actually live, dependency replaces self-reliance. Ownership is a small daily exercise in personal sovereignty. It means the tools, media, and machines in your life answer to you and nobody else. Licensing means the tools, media, and machines in your life answer to a company’s terms of service, updated unilaterally, agreed to by a click you don’t remember making. Multiply that arrangement across every category of a person’s material life, their car, their books, their appliances, their farm equipment, and you get a population that has been quietly trained out of the expectation that things should belong to them at all. That is not a small cultural shift. That is the erosion of a habit of mind that underwrites a free and self-governing people: the assumption that a person’s own effort and money entitle them to actual, unconditional possession of the fruits of that effort.
The pattern repeats everywhere you look
Video games are simply the loudest and most well-documented example of a pattern that has already colonized most of the American consumer economy.
Cars. BMW spent from 2020 to 2023 charging a monthly or annual subscription fee to activate heated seats that were already installed in the car at the factory, the hardware fully present and functioning, gated behind a paywall that could be switched on or off remotely. Customer revolt eventually forced BMW to drop the specific heated-seat subscription, with a company sales executive admitting that “user acceptance isn’t that high” when people feel they’re paying twice for something already bolted into their car. But BMW has been explicit that it remains, in its own words, “fully committed” to subscription features generally through its ConnectedDrive platform, and Mercedes-Benz currently sells a $1,200-a-year subscription that unlocks an extra 20 to 24 percent of horsepower on certain electric models, an engine capability the car already physically possesses, gated behind a monthly toll. Industry analysts project the automotive subscription-features market to grow from roughly $9 billion in 2024 to nearly $800 billion by 2032. That is not a market responding to consumer demand. That is a market responding to the discovery that a car, once it’s connected to the internet, can be metered like a utility instead of sold like a possession.
Farm equipment. John Deere and a small number of other manufacturers dominate the market for large tractors and combines, and for over a decade, they have used proprietary onboard computers to prevent farmers and independent mechanics from performing their own repairs, forcing farmers to wait, sometimes days, for an authorized dealer to arrive, at harvest-critical moments when a delay can cost tens of thousands of dollars in lost yield. Senator Elizabeth Warren’s office estimated the cost of Deere’s repair restrictions to farmers at over $4 billion a year. Colorado became the first state to pass a right-to-repair law covering farm equipment, effective January 2024, forcing manufacturers to sell the same diagnostic tools and software access to farmers and independent shops that authorized dealers already have. Deere settled a related class-action suit in 2025 for $99 million, a sum critics noted amounts to less than a dollar an acre across the years the restrictions were in effect, and the FTC, joined by the attorneys general of Illinois and Minnesota, has since sued Deere directly over the practice. As of early 2025, more than a dozen additional states were considering similar legislation, after industry lobbying groups had spent years signing non-binding memoranda of understanding designed specifically to head off actual binding law.
Digital media generally. The Amazon Kindle situation described above is not an isolated incident. It’s the standard model now, formalized. As of late 2025, Amazon’s own purchase language explicitly tells customers they are buying a license, not a book, one Amazon can restrict, modify, or revoke. Amazon has also progressively removed the ability to download and back up purchased ebooks onto a device you control, meaning your “library” exists entirely inside Amazon’s ecosystem, readable only on Amazon’s terms, for as long as Amazon finds it convenient to keep serving it to you.
Music. Music actually offers a useful contrast to everything else in this piece, because for once the data shows people pushing back with their own money, not just complaining about it. The RIAA’s 2024 year-end report put U.S. recorded music revenue at $17.7 billion, and streaming accounted for 84 percent of that, the same as the last three years running. Digital downloads, the era of buying an individual song or album as a file, have all but died on their own. That category brought in $336 million in 2024, down 18 percent from the year before, and now makes up about 2 percent of the market. Back in 2012, it was 43 percent. Buying a digital song, it turns out, never really solved the ownership problem to begin with. It just moved the same license-not-a-copy arrangement into a smaller file. There’s no functioning digital-first sale doctrine for music either, a point the courts made explicit when they shut down ReDigi’s attempt to build a legal resale marketplace for used MP3s. And when Google decided to fold Google Play Music into YouTube Music in 2020, anyone who’d spent a decade buying tracks through the store got a deadline, February 24, 2021, to manually migrate everything or lose it. A purchase, in that arrangement, is really just a countdown clock with better manners than most.
Vinyl is the part of this story worth paying attention to. It has now grown for eighteen straight years, hit $1.4 billion in 2024, the highest number since 1984, and outsold CDs for the third year running, 44 million records to 33 million discs. Nobody is claiming vinyl offers better convenience. It doesn’t. It’s heavier, it scratches, and you can’t take it jogging. What it offers instead is a record that belongs to you, permanently, regardless of what any company does with its servers, its catalog, or its licensing deals. A growing number of people, including plenty who weren’t alive the first time vinyl was popular, have looked at that trade and decided the inconvenience is worth it. That’s not nostalgia. That’s a market quietly telling you what ownership is actually worth once people understand what they’re giving up without it.
Streaming and finished creative work. This is a related but distinct wrinkle worth including, because it shows the same corporate logic operating on culture itself, not just on the individual consumer’s copy of it. In 2022, Warner Bros. Discovery shelved the completed, tested, $90 million Batgirl film entirely, never releasing it anywhere, in order to book it as a tax write-off. A year later, the studio tried the same move with the finished, well-tested Looney Tunes film Coyote vs. Acme, taking an estimated $30 million write-off on a movie that had already screened successfully with audiences, until public backlash and a member of Congress calling the move “predatory and anti-competitive” forced the studio to let the film be shopped to other buyers instead. Disney quietly removed dozens of original movies and series from Disney+ the same year for similar accounting reasons. None of this is about a customer’s individual purchase being revoked. It’s the same underlying principle at one remove: a finished, paid-for piece of culture, work that real people spent years making, can simply be deleted from existence because a balance sheet prefers it that way, and the audience that would have watched it has no more say in the matter than a Kindle owner has over Amazon’s licensing terms. Ownership, in this case, was never even offered. The work belonged to the studio outright, and the studio decided the public would be better off never seeing it at all.
Housing. This one deserves a more careful accounting than the loudest headlines usually give it, because the honest data is more nuanced than the popular narrative, and a serious argument doesn’t need to overstate its case. Institutional investors as a whole own a small fraction of the national single-family housing stock, something on the order of half a percent nationally according to industry and bank research, and the largest player, Blackstone, holds roughly 0.06 percent of all single-family homes in the country. Institutional purchases of single-family homes have actually fallen more than 90 percent since 2022, and some of the largest firms in the space report being net sellers rather than net buyers in the current market. Anyone arguing that a shadowy cabal of Wall Street landlords is single-handedly responsible for the national affordability crisis is not describing the topline numbers accurately.
But the topline national number obscures the part of the story that is real and worth taking seriously: institutional ownership is not evenly distributed. It concentrates hard in specific metro submarkets, particularly across the Sun Belt, where a small number of large operators can own a meaningful share of the starter-home inventory in a given zip code, enough to move local rents and local competition for entry-level buyers even while the national percentage stays tiny. The concern was serious enough that in January 2026 an executive order was signed specifically to restrict large institutional buyers from purchasing single-family homes, a sign that the political pressure around this issue, deserved or not at the national scale, has become bipartisan and real. The deeper and better-supported story isn’t that a small number of large landlords are buying up America. It’s that decades of restrictive zoning, permitting bottlenecks, and construction costs have suppressed new housing supply so severely, an estimated national shortfall in the millions of units, that even a modest, concentrated increase in large-scale buying in undersupplied markets is enough to visibly worsen an affordability crisis that was already structural. The institutional buyer isn’t the root cause. It’s a symptom that shows up faster and more visibly than the slow-moving supply failure underneath it, and it converts what used to be a starter home, a rung on a ladder a family climbed and eventually owned outright, into a permanent rental unit managed by a portfolio company answering to shareholders instead of neighbors.
Software and everything attached to it. Adobe moved its entire product suite to subscription-only pricing over a decade ago, and the rest of the software industry followed almost in lockstep, because a subscription converts a single sale into a regular, renewing revenue stream and, not incidentally, gives the seller leverage to raise the price at will on customers who have already built years of workflow, files, and institutional habit around the product. Printer manufacturers have rolled out ink subscriptions that disable a printer’s ability to print at all if a monthly fee lapses, even if there’s a full cartridge sitting in the machine. Smart home devices and appliances routinely get “bricked,” rendered nonfunctional, when a manufacturer decides to shut down the cloud servers the device depends on to do things a simple mechanical version of the same product would have done without any server at all.
The specifics differ by industry. The underlying move is identical every time: take something that used to be a discrete, finished, owned object, wire it into a server or a subscription the seller controls, and convert a single transaction into a permanent toll booth. Do this widely enough, across cars and books and tractors and homes and kitchen appliances, and you have re-engineered the basic relationship a person has with the material world around them, from ownership to permission.
The economics behind the disappearing act, in plain terms
None of this is mysterious once you look at who benefits and who bears the cost, which is the honest way to read almost any corporate decision that gets dressed up in the language of customer convenience.
A one-time sale of a physical product has a natural ceiling. Sony sells you a disc once. GameStop resells that disc to someone else, and Sony makes nothing on the second sale. The used market, the lending, the trade-ins, all of it represents revenue Sony never sees, revenue that instead flows to the used game store, or to the friend who borrowed your copy for a weekend instead of buying his own. From a publisher’s perspective, a healthy secondary market for physical goods is leakage. It’s money escaping the system.
Digital-only distribution plugs that leak completely. There is no used copy of a digital license. There is no trade-in value, no lending, no garage sale. Every single person who ever plays that game pays full retail price directly to the publisher, with no intermediary and no resale competition ever eating into that revenue. Add a server dependency on top, and the publisher gains a second lever: the ability to sunset the product entirely once it stops being profitable to support, freeing up infrastructure costs with no obligation to the people who already paid, because contractually, per the license terms nobody read, they were never entitled to permanent access in the first place.
The same math runs through every industry in this piece. A car company that sells you a finished, fully-featured vehicle for one price has made all the money on that car it is ever going to make from you, aside from the occasional trip to the dealership for maintenance. A car company that ships the vehicle with hardware capabilities gated behind ongoing subscriptions has converted a single purchase into a permanent revenue stream extending for the life of the vehicle. A publisher that lets you download your ebook to a device you control has given up leverage over you. A publisher that keeps your library trapped inside its own app has guaranteed you’ll keep paying its subscription fee, or keep buying inside its walled garden, indefinitely, because switching costs you everything you already own.
This is the honest, unsentimental explanation for the trend, and it’s worth stating plainly rather than dressing it up as villainy: companies are rational actors pursuing recurring revenue over one-time revenue, because recurring revenue is more predictable, more valuable to shareholders, and structurally more profitable over the long run. Nobody at Sony or John Deere or BMW is twirling a mustache. They are following the incentive that the corporate structure hands them, which is to maximize return, and the frictionless legal environment around digital licensing, combined with a customer base that mostly does not read terms of service, has made squeezing ownership out of the transaction one of the most reliable profit levers available to a modern company. The problem isn’t that these companies are unusually greedy. The problem is that the party deciding to convert ownership into licensing bears none of the cost of that decision. The cost lands entirely on the customer, later, quietly, after the sale is already closed and the money has already changed hands. That mismatch between who benefits and who pays is the whole engine. Fix the mismatch, and the practice becomes far less attractive to engage in.
The legal terrain, and why it mostly favors the seller
It’s worth understanding, briefly and without a law degree, why this has been so easy for companies to pull off, because the honest answer is that the law has simply not kept pace with the technology, and in some places actively works against the consumer.
The first sale doctrine, described earlier, protects the resale of physical copies. It does not extend cleanly to digital goods, because a digital “resale” legally requires copying the file, and copying without authorization is exactly what copyright law exists to prevent. Courts have repeatedly declined to invent a digital equivalent, most notably in the ReDigi case, which shut down a company’s attempt to build a legitimate resale market for digital music.
Separately, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act’s anti-circumvention provisions, Section 1201, make it illegal to bypass digital rights management even for otherwise legal purposes, like preserving a game whose servers have gone dark, or repairing a piece of equipment locked behind proprietary software. The Library of Congress grants narrow, temporary exemptions to this rule every three years, covering things like preservation of abandoned online games by libraries and archives, but the exemptions are limited, technical, and inaccessible to an ordinary person trying to keep their own purchased library functional.
Even the legal concept of “ownership” for something as basic as installed software has been narrowed by the courts in ways most people never hear about. In Vernor v. Autodesk, a federal appeals court ruled that a software license can be structured so that a buyer never actually owns their copy at all, no matter how much they paid, as long as the license agreement says clearly enough that the transaction is a license and not a sale, and imposes enough restrictions on transfer and use. That ruling gave every software company, and by extension every company selling anything with software embedded in it, a clean legal roadmap: word the agreement correctly, and the first sale doctrine simply never attaches in the first place. This is why the fine print matters so much more than it used to. It isn’t decorative. It’s the entire legal basis on which a company gets to decide, later, that you never owned what you thought you paid for.
Where the law has moved, it has moved slowly and only under direct public pressure. California’s AB 2426, signed in 2024, now requires digital storefronts to disclose clearly, at the point of sale, that a customer is buying a license rather than permanent ownership, and to avoid using the word “buy” or “purchase” in a way that misleads consumers about what they’re actually getting. It’s a transparency requirement, not a ban on the practice, but it’s a real, if modest, legislative win, and it exists because enough ordinary people got angry enough about Sony’s Discovery deletion to make noise their state legislators eventually had to answer. Colorado’s farm equipment right-to-repair law exists for the same reason: farmers organized, testified, and refused to let the issue die in committee the way it had in Iowa, Missouri, and South Dakota. The Stop Killing Games initiative gathered over 1.3 million verified signatures specifically because enough individual people decided a single lost video game was worth the trouble of formal political organizing.
The throughline in every one of these wins is the same, and it’s worth sitting with, because it’s the actual lesson of this entire piece: the correction did not come from a benevolent regulator noticing a problem and fixing it on its own initiative. It came from ordinary people organizing directly around a shared, concrete grievance, applying sustained pressure through consumer associations, petitions, and lawsuits, until the people with the power to change the rules had no easier option left than to change them. Even then, the wins have been narrow, contested, and frequently rolled back or watered down by industry lobbying, as the failure of California’s Protect Our Games Act demonstrates. Nobody is coming to fix this for you from above. The people who fixed the small pieces of it that have actually been fixed did so from below, by organizing with their neighbors and refusing to accept the terms they were handed.
What individual sovereignty actually requires
Step back from the specific industries for a moment and look at what’s actually being asked of people, across all these categories at once. Own less. Depend more. Trust the server to stay on, the subscription to stay affordable, the corporation’s business priorities to remain aligned with yours indefinitely, with no recourse if any of that changes.
That is a bad trade for an individual to make, not because convenience is worthless, but because dependency without recourse is a specific and recognizable kind of vulnerability. A person who owns their tools, their books, their vehicle, and their home outright can weather a company’s bad quarter, a platform’s business pivot, a manufacturer’s discontinued product line without losing access to the things they’ve already paid for. A person whose entire material life runs through licenses, subscriptions, and server dependencies has handed a dozen different corporations a dozen different levers over their daily functioning, and has to hope none of those companies ever decides, for entirely legal reasons stated in fine print that was agreed to with a single unread click, to pull one.
This isn’t a call to reject modern conveniences and go live off the grid. Digital distribution genuinely does offer real advantages: instant access, lower prices in some cases, no shelf space required, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest. The point isn’t that digital is evil and physical is virtuous. The point is that a person should know, clearly, which of the two arrangements they’re entering into, and should default toward ownership whenever ownership is actually available and the stakes are worth it, rather than sliding by default into licensing because licensing was the path of least resistance at the checkout screen.
The deeper point, the one underneath all the specific product categories, is that a society made up of people who own less and depend more is a society that has quietly lost some of its capacity to take care of itself. A person who can fix their own tractor, repair their own appliance, resell their own game collection, or lend a neighbor a book without a corporation’s permission is a person who needs less from distant institutions and can do more, directly, for the people around them. A person locked into a maze of revocable licenses, none of which they fully understand and all of which can change without notice, is a person who has been made more dependent, more passive, and less capable, whether they notice it happening or not. Multiply that condition across a whole population and you get a citizenry that has been trained, product category by product category, to expect less control over its own material life and to accept that loss of control as the ordinary cost of modern convenience. That is a habit of mind, and habits of mind are exactly the kind of thing that determines whether people are capable of solving their own problems together or whether they wait, passively, for someone else to solve those problems for them.
Learn to fix your own stuff
Everything above is a description of a problem. Here is the most direct thing a person can do about it, and it doesn’t require a lawyer, a legislature, or a single click of “I Agree.”
Learn to fix your own stuff.
Not all of it. Nobody is asking you to rebuild a transmission in the driveway on a Tuesday night if you’ve never held a torque wrench. But most repairs are not transmission rebuilds. Most repairs are a stuck screw, a bad sensor, a worn gasket, a loose wire, a part that snapped and needs a replacement snapped back in. iFixit, the online repair database that’s been publishing free step-by-step manuals since 2003, makes a point of saying that if you can change a light bulb, you already have most of the skill required for the most common electronics repairs. That’s not a sales pitch. It’s just true. Repair is mostly patience, the right screwdriver, and a willingness to look something up before assuming it’s beyond you.
This matters for reasons beyond saving money on a service call, though it does that too. Every repair you make yourself is a small, quiet refusal of the entire arrangement described in the rest of this piece. It’s the difference between being a person who depends on a manufacturer’s authorized service department and a person who doesn’t need to ask that manufacturer’s permission for much of anything. The habit compounds. A person who fixes a running toilet stops being afraid of the water shut-off valve. A person who replaces a car battery stops being afraid of the hood. Competence builds on itself, and every skill you pick up makes the next one easier to learn.
The resources already exist, and most of them are free.
Start with iFixit. It hosts more than 44,000 repair guides, covering everything from phone screens to sewing machines to robot vacuums, written by a mix of staff, university partners, and ordinary people who fixed something once and decided to write down how. The organization has also been the loudest advocate for right-to-repair legislation in the country, and their own survey of independent repair shops found that 96 percent of them have had to turn a customer away because a manufacturer withheld the parts, tools, or documentation needed to do the job. That statistic is worth sitting with. It means the barrier to fixing your own things, in a huge number of cases, isn’t a lack of skill on your part. It’s a manufacturer deciding you shouldn’t be allowed to try.
Beyond iFixit, there’s a whole tier of resources most people never think to check. Vehicle manufacturers are required, in many states now, to make service information available to independent shops, and a lot of that same information sits in Haynes and Chilton manuals that have existed since long before the internet did. Appliance manufacturers post parts diagrams and service manuals on their own websites if you look past the marketing pages. YouTube, for all its faults, has become one of the largest repair libraries on earth, and a search for almost any make and model of anything will turn up someone who has already taken the thing apart on camera and shown you where the bodies are buried. None of this requires a subscription. None of it requires permission. It just requires deciding to look before deciding you can’t.
Repair Cafes. If reading a guide alone in your garage isn’t your style, there’s a version of this that comes with company. Repair Cafe International, a nonprofit founded in Amsterdam in 2009, now supports more than 3,800 Repair Cafes across 43 countries, free community events where volunteers with real skills, electricians, seamstresses, bike mechanics, small appliance repair people, sit down with neighbors and fix things together instead of throwing them away. Nobody gets billed. Nobody signs a service agreement. A broken toaster or a torn coat gets fixed at a folding table in a church basement or a library meeting room, and the person who brought it in usually leaves knowing a little more than they did walking in. That’s the whole model. It costs almost nothing to run, and it works because it doesn’t depend on anyone’s permission to exist. A handful of people with the skill and the willingness to share it is the entire infrastructure required.
If there isn’t one near you, start one. The Repair Cafe Foundation will hand you a starter kit and a set of house rules for free. The barrier to entry is a room, a few tables, and a couple of people who already know how to solder or sew.
Share what you learn.
The other half of this is easy to skip, and it shouldn’t be. Once you fix something, tell someone how you did it. Write it down. Take a picture while you’re in there with the case open. iFixit’s own guidance to new users is almost embarrassingly simple: fix something, then teach the repair, because the next person who breaks the same thing shouldn’t have to learn it the hard way twice. That’s the whole model that built a 44,000-guide library out of nothing but people who decided their own hard-won five minutes of troubleshooting was worth writing down for a stranger.
This doesn’t require a website or an audience. It can be your kid watching you replace a faucet cartridge. It can be a text to your neighbor with a photo of the part number that finally worked. It can be standing in the driveway explaining to your brother-in-law why the check engine light doesn’t automatically mean a new car. Knowledge that only lives in one person’s head dies with that person, or at least with their willingness to keep answering the phone. Knowledge that gets shared keeps working long after you’ve moved on to the next broken thing.
Teach the kids, on purpose, through the programs built for exactly this.
This is the part that actually determines whether any of this outlasts the current generation of frustrated adults. A habit of fixing things has to be taught, and it has to be taught early, before convenience culture teaches a kid the opposite lesson first: that broken things simply get replaced, that a service exists for everything, that competence is somebody else’s job.
Scouting programs have understood this for over a century, and the merit badge system is a genuinely well-built piece of infrastructure for teaching it. A Scout can earn the Automotive Maintenance badge by learning to check brakes, change oil, and diagnose a basic electrical fault, using an actual vehicle and an actual owner’s manual, not a simulation. The Home Repairs badge covers patching drywall, fixing a running toilet, replacing an electrical cord, and repairing a doorknob, the exact category of small household failure that sends most adults straight to a service call. Electricity and Electronics cover wiring a circuit and understanding what’s actually happening inside the devices that run a modern house. Farm Mechanics puts a kid in front of a small engine and has them take it apart and get it running again. None of these badges are ceremonial. A counselor has to watch the work happen and sign off that the kid can actually do it, not just describe it.
4-H runs a parallel track through agriculture and mechanics, teaching kids to maintain equipment, work with their hands, and take ownership of a project from start to finish, often literally raising or building something they’re responsible for. FFA does similar work specifically around agricultural mechanics and equipment maintenance, putting students in front of the same kind of machinery that gave rise to the John Deere repair fight described earlier in this piece, except these students are learning to open the hood instead of waiting for a dealer.
None of these programs exist because some committee decided self-reliance was a nice value to put on a pamphlet. They exist because generations of adults who came before us understood, correctly, that competence has to be built deliberately, one supervised repair at a time, or it doesn’t get built at all. A kid who wires a lamp switch under a counselor’s eye at thirteen is a kid who, at thirty, looks at a blinking check-engine light or a dead outlet and thinks “let me take a look” instead of reaching straight for the phone. That instinct is worth more than almost anything else you could hand a young person, and it costs a weekend and a merit badge pamphlet to plant it.
If you’re a parent, a Scout leader, a 4-H volunteer, or just an aunt or uncle with a functioning set of tools, look for the chance to hand a kid a screwdriver and stand there while they figure it out. Let them get it wrong the first time. Let them strip a screw. That’s how the skill actually takes. A kid who’s never been allowed to fail at a repair grows into an adult who’s afraid to try one, and an adult afraid to try one is exactly the customer every industry described earlier in this piece is counting on.
None of this is a complete answer to a global shift in how corporations sell things. It won’t repeal an EULA or bring back a delisted game. But it’s the one piece of the puzzle that doesn’t require anyone’s permission, doesn’t cost much, and gets stronger the more people do it. A community full of people who know how to fix a faucet, wire a lamp, and diagnose a dead battery is a community that needs less from distant service departments and can do more for the people three doors down. That’s not a policy position. It’s just a Saturday afternoon, repeated often enough to become a habit, and passed on to the next kid who’s willing to hold the flashlight.
What can actually be done about it?
None of this requires waiting on Congress, and it shouldn’t, because Congress has shown no particular urgency about the problem and industry lobbying has proven consistently effective at slowing down the state-level efforts that do exist. What follows is a practical list, aimed at what an individual, a family, or a small local group can actually do, starting today, with tools that already exist.
Buy physical when physical is genuinely physical. Not every disc or cartridge on a store shelf is actually complete. Check before buying. Several publishers, notably CD Projekt Red with Cyberpunk 2077’s Ultimate Edition on Switch 2, have made a point of shipping the full game on cartridge with no download required, and some outlets now maintain running lists of which physical releases are complete versus which are empty Game-Key Cards in a box. Reward the publishers doing it right with your money, and let the ones doing it wrong hear about it in reviews and sales figures.
Check for DRM-free options before buying digital. Not all digital purchases are licenses in the worst sense. Storefronts like GOG sell games with no DRM at all, meaning the installer file itself is yours, downloadable, backupable, and playable indefinitely regardless of whether GOG as a company exists in twenty years. The difference between a DRM-free digital purchase and a server-locked one is enormous, and it costs nothing to check before buying.
Read the terms once, deliberately, for anything expensive. Nobody reads the full terms of service for a streaming subscription, and that’s fine. But for a major purchase, a car with software-gated features, a piece of farm or shop equipment, a home appliance with a cloud dependency, spend the ten minutes to find out what you’re actually agreeing to. Search the product name alongside “subscription” or “right to repair” before you buy, not after.
Support right-to-repair legislation at the state level, and show up for it locally. This is the one place where organized, local political pressure has produced real, durable results, Colorado’s farm equipment law being the clearest example. These fights are won county fair booth by county fair booth, farm bureau meeting by farm bureau meeting, not by a national campaign. If you live in a state without a right-to-repair law, your state legislature almost certainly has a bill sitting in committee that needs constituents showing up to testify for it.
Use, join, or start a tool library or repair collective. This is the most direct, most local answer to the entire problem, and it is already happening in communities across the country without waiting on anyone’s permission. A tool library lets neighbors share expensive equipment nobody needs to own individually. A repair cafe gives people with the skill to fix a broken appliance, a torn coat, a wobbly chair, a place to pass that skill along to a neighbor for free, keeping a repairable object out of the landfill and keeping the knowledge of how to fix things alive in the community instead of locked inside a manufacturer’s authorized service network. These institutions solve, at the neighborhood level and through nothing but voluntary cooperation, the exact problem that corporate licensing schemes and consolidated repair monopolies create. They require no legislation to start. They require a few people to decide to do it.
Build and protect a real secondary market wherever you can. Buy used. Sell what you no longer need instead of letting it rot in a closet. Trade with neighbors directly. Every transaction that happens outside a corporate platform, between two people who simply agree on a price, is a small act of economic independence that no terms-of-service update can touch.
Back up what you’re legally permitted to back up, and prefer formats that allow it. Where DRM-free downloads exist, use them and keep local copies on a drive you control, not just in a cloud account someone else administers. This is legal, straightforward, and the single best insurance policy against a company’s future decision to delete something you already paid for.
Support the organizations already fighting this fight, and understand how they won. Stop Killing Games didn’t succeed by asking politely. It succeeded by gathering over a million verified signatures and backing that number up with lawsuits in multiple countries. UFC-Que Choisir didn’t ask Ubisoft nicely; it sued. The farmers who got Colorado’s law passed did it by showing up in person, year after year, after watching four neighboring states let similar bills die in committee. None of these wins were fast, and none of them were free. They were the product of ordinary people organizing directly with each other around a shared, specific grievance, and refusing to let it drop.
Vote with your dollar even when it costs a little more. A publisher that ships a complete game on cartridge, a manufacturer that doesn’t gate hardware you already paid for behind a subscription, a retailer that still sells you something you can actually keep, deserves your business over a competitor doing the opposite, even at a modest price premium. Markets respond to money faster than they respond to complaints.
Teach the next generation the difference between owning and renting, on purpose. Kids growing up now have never known a world where a game, a movie, or a song didn’t just appear on a screen the instant someone wanted it. That’s not their fault, and it’s not something to be preachy about, but it’s worth actually showing a kid the difference between a shelf of books that are theirs no matter what happens to the publisher, and a streaming queue that could vanish overnight if a licensing deal falls through. A kid who understands that difference early grows into an adult who reads the fine print instead of clicking past it.
Choose local, independent repair and sale over the manufacturer’s authorized channel whenever you reasonably can. Every dollar spent at a local repair shop instead of a manufacturer’s service center is a dollar that keeps a skill and a small business alive in your own community, instead of funneling that money back to the same company trying to restrict repair access in the first place. The independent repair economy is a direct, practical alternative to the monopolized one, and it survives only if people actually use it.
Keep receipts, manuals, and documentation for anything expensive and mechanical. This sounds almost too basic to mention, but a well-documented piece of equipment, a car, a tractor, or a major appliance, is easier to repair independently, easier to resell, and easier to defend your rights over if a manufacturer ever disputes your ownership or your right to service it yourself. Ownership that can’t be proven is ownership that’s easy to erode.
Don’t wait for permission to organize. Every legal and legislative win described in this piece started as a handful of people deciding a problem was worth their time before anyone else agreed with them. A repair cafe starts with two or three neighbors and a folding table. A right-to-repair bill starts with a farmer willing to drive to the state capitol and testify on a Tuesday afternoon. A consumer lawsuit starts with someone deciding that a canceled game, a deleted movie, or a bricked appliance was worth the hassle of doing something about, even when the odds looked bad. None of the wins in this piece looked inevitable before they happened. They looked like a small, stubborn group of people who refused to accept the terms they’d been handed.
The larger stakes
Video games are a small thing in the grand scheme of a person’s life, and nobody’s freedom hinges on whether a cartridge has the whole game on it. But the pattern visible in gaming, the deliberate, engineered shift from a one-time sale of a permanent object to a recurring, revocable license for temporary access, is the same pattern showing up in cars, books, farm equipment, appliances, software, and increasingly, in slices of the housing market. It is not a coincidence that it’s happening everywhere at once. It’s the same business logic, discovered independently by industry after industry, because the logic works, and because almost nothing in the current legal or cultural environment pushes back against it hard enough to make it stop working.
What’s actually at stake isn’t any single product category. It’s whether the ordinary material relationship between a person and the things they’ve paid for still means anything, or whether that relationship has been quietly rewritten, industry by industry, into something closer to a lease that can be terminated by the landlord whenever the landlord finds it convenient. A society that lets that rewrite happen without resistance is a society that has traded a portion of its own self-sufficiency for a marginal improvement in convenience, and probably didn’t notice the trade was happening until the bill came due.
The correction, where it’s happened at all, has never come from the top. It has come from people organizing with the people around them, refusing a bad deal in large enough numbers to make refusing it expensive for the company offering it, and rebuilding, in small and unglamorous ways, tool libraries, repair cafes, secondhand markets, state-level right-to-repair coalitions, the habits and local institutions that let a community take care of its own stuff without waiting for permission from a distributor, a licensor, or a server administrator three thousand miles away. It’s a practical project, not a nostalgic one, and it’s already working in the places people have bothered to try it.
Own what you can. Fix what you can. Share what you can with the people around you. And the next time a checkout screen asks you to click “I Agree” without telling you plainly whether you’re buying something or just renting the right to use it for a while, take the extra ten seconds to find out which one it actually is. It’s a small habit, but it adds up.