When 'Buy' Stopped Meaning You Owned It

This is not the same story as membership billing. A Prime fee or a Creative Cloud seat is a recurring charge for ongoing access. You know, at least in outline, that the relationship continues. The ownership problem is what happens when the interface uses the language of a completed sale, and the contract delivers a revocable permission. California noticed the mismatch clearly enough to regulate the word. Assembly Bill 2426, effective January 1, 2025, restricts 'buy' and 'purchase' for digital movies, music, books, apps, and games sold as revocable licenses, unless the seller gets a specified acknowledgment or posts a clear statement with a link to the full terms.

Physical copies still get first sale. In 2013 the Supreme Court held in Kirtsaeng v. John Wiley & Sons that a student could import and resell foreign-edition textbooks lawfully made abroad. The Court refused to read a geographic limit into 'lawfully made under this title.' Used bookstores, library lending, and garage-sale DVDs depend on that rule. Digital goods ran into two other doctrines instead.

The first is the license-versus-sale distinction. In 2010 the Ninth Circuit held in Vernor v. Autodesk that a software user is a licensee, not an owner of the copy, when the copyright holder says a license is granted, significantly restricts transfer, and imposes notable use restrictions. Autodesk's AutoCAD agreement did all three. Timothy Vernor had bought used discs at an office sale and listed them on eBay. Because the original customer was a licensee, Vernor never became an owner, and first sale did not apply. The second is reproduction. In 2018 the Second Circuit held in Capitol Records v. ReDigi that a service designed to 'resell' iTunes files still made new copies on ReDigi's servers and on the buyer's device. First sale limits distribution of a particular copy. It does not authorize making another one. The court said people who want a digital first-sale rule should take that argument to Congress.

Valve's Steam Subscriber Agreement is unusually blunt, which is useful as a specimen rather than as a unique villain. It grants a non-exclusive license for personal, non-commercial use. It states that subscriptions acquired in any marketplace are license rights, that you have no ownership interest in them, and that Valve does not recognize transfers, including transfers by operation of law, made outside Steam. 'By operation of law' is the clause that reaches inheritance. A shelf of discs can go to an heir. A Steam library, on those terms, cannot be willed as property. Adobe Fonts, bundled with Creative Cloud, are licensed for personal and commercial use while the seat is active. They are not a desktop font file you keep after you cancel in the way a 1990s Fontographer purchase was.

Games and fonts are the clean cases because the contracts say 'license' in public. Movies are messier because the button still says 'Buy' in many storefronts, even when the studio's deal with the platform can later pull the title. Electronic sell-through, the industry's name for that button, is shrinking next to streaming. It is also the category California's disclosure law is aimed at.

Music went through the same replacement earlier, with a vinyl exception that does not restore the old CD economy. The RIAA's 2024 year-end report put US recorded-music retail value at $17.7 billion. Streaming was $14.9 billion, 84 percent of the total for the third consecutive year. Physical formats were $2.0 billion, and vinyl, at $1.4 billion, accounted for most of that. Paid subscriptions crossed 100 million accounts. A vinyl album is a copy you can resell. A Spotify track is not. Both can be excellent ways to listen. Only one is property in the first-sale sense.

Variety, summarizing the same DEG release, noted that physical disc revenue was down 94 percent from its 2006 peak of about $16.6 billion. That peak is the world first sale was built for: a mass market of objects. Streaming is a mass market of accounts. The cultural habit of saying 'I bought that movie' survived the object.

Farm equipment is the case that makes the software layer visible because the object is too large to pretend it is an app. The FTC and the attorneys general of Illinois, Arizona, Michigan, Minnesota, and Wisconsin sued Deere in January 2025, alleging that Deere made the only software tools capable of performing all electronic repairs and gave those tools only to authorized dealers. Farmers, the complaint said, faced delays and higher costs. On July 8, 2026, the Commission announced a stipulated order: for ten years, Deere must make equivalent repair resources available to farmers and independent shops on fair and reasonable terms, including reading and clearing fault codes, pairing new electronic parts, restarting a machine after an emissions shutdown, and searching technical manuals. Dealers must not retaliate against customers who use those tools.

That is a real, sourced change in who may use the software. It is not a holding that the farmer bought the source code. A separate class action over past repair costs produced a proposed $99 million settlement fund in 2026, which is compensation for alleged overcharges, not a transfer of intellectual property. If a piece of writing tells you Deere 'sold you the tractor but not the tractor,' check which of those two remedies it is actually describing. They are easy to mash together and they are not the same.