This week Sony reminded a few hundred thousand of its customers what they’d actually purchased. The answer was nothing.

On September 1, 2026, 551 movies and TV shows disappear from PlayStation Store libraries. Not from the storefront — from the accounts of people who already paid for them. Terminator 2. Total Recall. The Deer Hunter. From Dusk Till Dawn. Hot Fuzz. All gone, because a licensing deal Sony had with the distributor StudioCanal quietly lapsed. The notice tells buyers their films will be “removed from your video library.” That’s the whole message. No apology, no refund, no replacement — a polite corporate shrug and goodbye to the thing you thought was yours.

Buy Terminator 2 on Blu-ray in 2010 and it’s on your shelf today. It’ll be there in 2040, whatever deal Sony signs or doesn’t. “Buy” it on PlayStation and it evaporates the moment a contract you never saw expires. Same movie, same money. One you own; the other you were allowed to borrow until further notice.

None of this is a glitch. It’s the business model, and it has crept into nearly every digital thing you pay for: games, films, music, the software you use to earn a living. We’ve been quietly retrained to rent our own belongings back from the people who sold them to us, and most of us signed off without reading a word. So let’s read the words.

How we got here: the slow boil

None of this arrived overnight. It came the way most quietly catastrophic things do — one reasonable-sounding step at a time.

We owned our records, then our cassettes, then our CDs and DVDs. Owned them so completely the question never came up. You could lend a CD to a friend, sell it, leave it to your kids, dig it out and play it thirty years later. Then music moved to the cloud, films moved to streaming, games moved to digital stores, and somewhere in that migration ownership got swapped for access. Almost nobody was told.

Software led the way, and proved how profitable the trick could be. In 2013 Adobe killed perpetual licences for its creative tools and pushed its entire customer base onto Creative Cloud: pay every month, forever, or lose the programs your career runs on. Stop paying and the software stops working — sometimes taking your files hostage with it. Microsoft has spent a decade herding people toward 365 subscriptions, and in October 2025 it ended support for Windows 10 outright, nudging millions toward new hardware or paid “extended security.” The perpetual licence, buy-once-own-forever, has been hunted to near-extinction and replaced with a meter that never stops running.

Games were next, and this time the industry said the quiet part out loud. In January 2024 Ubisoft’s own director of subscriptions told an interviewer that players would need to get comfortable “with not owning your game,” the way we’d given up our CD and DVD collections. The internet did not take it well. It also wasn’t wrong about where things were heading.

Then Ubisoft proved the point about as cruelly as possible. In 2024 it shut down the servers for The Crew, a racing game people had paid full price for, and the game became permanently unplayable — even for anyone holding a physical disc. The disc was now a coaster. The class-action that followed opens with an image you feel in your gut: imagine buying a pinball machine, then wandering into your den one day to find the paddles gone, the ball gone, the bumpers gone, your high score wiped, because the company decided you were finished playing.

The fight back — and why it’s on a knife’s edge right now

Here’s where it stops being a complaint and turns into a movement.

Sparked by The Crew, a campaign called Stop Killing Games — started by the YouTuber Ross Scott — set out to force one simple principle into law: if a company sells you a game, it shouldn’t be able to reach back in later and destroy it. Not “support every game forever,” which is how the industry likes to caricature the demand. Just this: when you switch off the lights, leave people a way to keep playing what they paid for. An offline mode. The server code. The tools to host it themselves.

It went global, and it got loud. The European Citizens’ Initiative gathered more than 1.29 million verified signatures and was formally submitted to the European Commission in January 2026. A UK Parliament petition pulled nearly 190,000. And in the United States — a country the movement had all but written off as legally hopeless — California’s Assembly passed the Protect Our Games Act (AB 1921) on May 27, 2026, by 43 votes to 16. The bill would force publishers to give 60 days’ notice before pulling the plug and then leave buyers with a playable version, a patch, or a full refund. It’s now in the State Senate. California has also required storefronts since January 2025 to disclose that “buy” means “licence” — which is precisely the lawsuit Amazon is now staring down.

So the momentum is real. Don’t mistake it for victory, though, because the establishment is already pushing back hard. On June 16, 2026, the European Commission delivered its response and declined to propose any law requiring games to stay playable. It offered “exchanges” and a promise to review its digital-content rules by the end of 2026. Translated: after 1.29 million signatures, Europe’s answer was we’ll think about it. The games industry’s trade bodies — the same ones fighting AB 1921 in California — argue that ownership rules are “too expensive,” and that asking them not to destroy what they’ve sold is somehow the same as demanding products last “forever.”

It isn’t the same, and they know it. “Forever” is a strawman. “Don’t reach into my house and delete what I paid for” is the actual ask. This fight is winnable, but it’s being fought right now, in real time, against corporations with lobbyists, lawyers, and the inertia of a public trained not to read the fine print. This is the moment that decides whether digital ownership survives or gets quietly legislated into the grave.

And even when they lose, you don’t win

This is the part that pushes the whole thing from infuriating to radicalizing. On the rare occasion one of these companies is caught and fined, the consumer — the actual person overcharged, misled, or stripped of what they paid for — sees little or none of it. The system is rigged at both ends.

Start with the size of the fines. To a corporation this big, a “multimillion-dollar penalty” isn’t a punishment; it’s a line item. Sony’s net income in its most recent fiscal year was roughly $7.5 billion. A $39-million ruling against a company that size is about half of one percent of a single year’s profit — a parking ticket on the windshield of a Ferrari. Canada’s own Competition Bureau says the quiet part out loud, arguing that penalties have to be large enough that companies don’t treat them as “simply a cost of doing business.” Which is a confession that, at current sizes, that’s exactly what they are. The fine gets budgeted in advance, like spoilage or shipping, and the scheme still clears a profit.

Now follow the money. When a Canadian regulator wins a deceptive-marketing case, where does the penalty go? Not to you. Penalties under the Competition Act are paid to the Receiver General and disappear into the Consolidated Revenue Fund, the federal government’s general bank account — the Supreme Court of Canada has confirmed that’s where the money lands. The people actually harmed get nothing out of it. In the Cineplex case the Tribunal could have ordered the company to repay consumers, and expressly declined, citing the inconvenience of distributing it. So that $38.9 million, which happened to match the exact amount Cineplex skimmed in hidden fees, went to government coffers, and the customers who paid those fees had to launch separate class actions just to try to claw back a slice of their own money.

Sit with the sequence for a second. A corporation quietly overcharges millions of people, gets caught, pays a survivable fine — and that fine becomes government revenue, an undifferentiated pile of cash spent on whatever the government of the day likes, with no connection to the harm and not one word of input from the people who were fleeced. You were robbed, the robber paid a toll to the state, and you were never even in the room.

Where the law does try to route money back to consumers, the math insults the injury. When the U.S. trade regulator hit Amazon with a “historic” $2.5-billion settlement in 2025 over deceptive subscription tactics, the headline sounded enormous — until you read the terms. A billion of it went straight to the government as a civil penalty, and the consumer refunds were capped at $51 a person, for years of unwanted charges. Amazon, which pulls in hundreds of billions in revenue, settled three days into the trial precisely to cap its exposure below whatever a jury might have handed down. The “record-breaking punishment” was, from Amazon’s side of the table, a bulk discount.

Even the class actions that do reach consumers tend to be their own punchline: settlements paid in coupons, account credits, or cheques small enough to laugh at, while legal fees and administrators quietly soak up the real value. However the case resolves, the pattern holds. The corporation carries on, the government or the lawyers get paid, and the consumer — the only party actually wronged — is left holding a token, or nothing.

That’s why “well, they got fined” should never pass for justice. A fine the company shrugs off, paid to someone other than the victim, is neither deterrent nor remedy. It’s a toll on a road they fully intend to keep driving. Until penalties are big enough to genuinely hurt and are built to send money back to the people harmed, getting “caught” is just one more cost of doing business — and you, the customer, are the one who ultimately covers it.

What to actually do about it

Outrage that goes nowhere is just content. So here’s where it goes.

Own what can still be owned. Buy physical media when it matters to you — discs and cartridges are copies you hold, not licences you borrow. For PC games, buy from DRM-free storefronts like GOG, which hand you standalone offline installers you can download, back up to your own drive, and run forever with no client, no account, no internet. For music, Bandcamp still lets you download and keep what you pay for. Baldur’s Gate 3, one of the most acclaimed games of the decade, shipped DRM-free. It can be done. Reward the companies that do it.

Treat “Buy” as “Rent — Until Further Notice.” Until the law forces honesty, assume every digital “purchase” is revocable and spend accordingly. If losing it would hurt, own it physically or DRM-free, or pull a backup the moment you’re allowed to.

Vote with your wallet, loudly. Subscriptions and licensed stores only win if we keep feeding them on autopilot. Cancel the ones you don’t need. Tell the platforms why. Buy from the ones that respect ownership.

Then make it political, because this is the part that actually changes things:

• Support Stop Killing Games and the push to fold real ownership protections into the digital-fairness laws now being written. That pressure is what’s kept the issue alive since the EU’s June brush-off.
• In Canada, write to your MP and to Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada (ISED) demanding a Canadian version of California’s ownership-disclosure and game-preservation laws, and an end to the digital-lock rules that criminalize backing up your own media.
• Push your provincial consumer-protection ministry — these rules are provincial too — to define “buy” honestly and to treat disappearing digital purchases as the deceptive practice they are.
• Report deceptive “buy” buttons and hidden fees to the Competition Bureau. The Cineplex ruling proves complaints can turn into consequences.
• Demand penalties that actually bite and actually compensate. A fine a corporation shrugs off, paid into general revenue instead of back to the people harmed, fixes nothing. Tell lawmakers consumer-protection penalties should scale to a company’s revenue and be routed to the victims, not quietly absorbed into the treasury.

Preserve. Back up what you legally own. Support libraries, archivists, and the people doing the unglamorous work of making sure the culture of this era still exists in fifty years — because the corporations selling it have shown, over and over, that they’ll let it rot the second it stops turning a profit.