It is important to weigh the transient nature of any purchase. A physical copy may be lost, damaged, stolen, become unusable due to lack of hardware, or just start to take up enough space that you decide its time to let it go.

In real life, as revocable as they may be, my digital purchases have withstood the test of time far better than my physical copy purchases. It matters who you buy from. It is understandably different for something you find value in having a physical collection.

As long as we're nitpicking every sense of the word "own", the strongest legal sense means you're the copyright holder, and every sense downstream of that is some lesser license. Buying a disc is a license to view the intellectual property, subject to various restrictions like only showing it within your personal home.

> The power to destroy a thing is the absolute control over it.

Frank Herbert, Dune

Dog eat dog Amped album is not present on Apple music and I suspect several streaming platform, and Remedy never again is not present on it as well https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Swarm_(album)

My personal definition is if you can't resell it, you don't own it.

If you can't hack it, you don't own it.

I think DRM is frankly a lot more of a consumer education/rights thing than some kind of outright evil.

Buy a DVD for X, or "own" a DRM version for Y<X - why not. It's a bargain I'm happy to strike, or at least I appreciate the option.

The issue starts when:

- vendors don't make it clear that they can pull the rug

- or indeed can pull the rug for no reason. A bank can close my bank account, but not for no reason - and they can't hold on to my money just because. It should be the same with DRM-protected assets

- people don't understand the tradeoff they're making. It's like complaining about reckless overspending in credit cards leading to insane interest. Yes, it's partly to do with the product, equally credit cards totally have their use when used responsibly, and a healthy society has people understanding the differences.

however - we can be idealistic - but when the rubber touches the road, a lot of things happen.

indie games only exploded due to being digital only, if Indies were to publish physical copies they would go out of business or they would be less of them.

a lot of people complain about amazon - but It has provided an avenue for out of print books to continue being sold - through on demand printing. yeah physical products gets extinct too.

the era of the cheap dvd movie financed a lot of independent films - streaming killed that.

so like everything in life - you win some, you lose some.

& yeah - if you can't hold it - you don't own it.

My ps3 disc reader os broken and the only games i can play are digital games. At anyppint they can shut down the servers and the game that i boight wont be available anymore