Why digital property is not real property?

Undoubtedly, the greatest attraction of the digital world is its ease of use. Today, in the digital world, we can access the desired media in less than a few seconds, but digital ownership is not real ownership, and this is its main problem.

When you buy a movie or series digitally, you usually cannot save the file somewhere and access it forever, and in fact, you only access the purchased content through a service. Although sometimes these services allow you to save the purchased content file on a device, but this also has limitations and most of the time you have to use the said file through a specific application.

The mentioned problem has attracted more attention now with the closure of Nintendo 3DS and Wii U digital stores. With the closure of said stores, around 1,000 digital games will be gone forever, bringing the biggest problem of digital ownership to light once again. In this type of ownership, the purchased content is only yours for as long as the selling company decides.

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Legal ownership: the selling model that is used everywhere

Currently, most PC gamers buy their games from the Steam store, and although console gamers have access to the physical version of the games, most of them also prefer to buy their games digitally. This issue is the same in other sectors and today users use platforms such as Spotify and YouTube to listen to music and Netflix and Disney Plus to watch movies and series.

In general, most of the users, for whatever reason, prepare their desired content digitally, but if the mentioned services are disabled, users will also lose their access to the purchased content. In addition to consumers, this issue is also considered a big problem for producers, because in this situation they also cannot sell their products in the future.

Of course, in defense of digital ownership, it should be said that the complete removal of content and prevention of re-downloading has not yet happened, and for example, users can still download their old games from 3DS and Wii U stores. Users can even still download Alan Wake, which was removed from Steam due to music licensing issues, from their game library. However, none of the mentioned items can be a guarantee for users.

This issue applies more to game consoles, because maintaining the infrastructure required for the stores of these devices requires a lot of time and money, and if the number of users of a console has decreased, there is no good economic reason to maintain the related store.

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What will be the future of digital ownership?

As mentioned, since digital content is so easy to access, the popularity of digital ownership is understandable. Buying content online and accessing it is not difficult, but since this type of ownership is still new, we have yet to see its long-term impact. Currently, the services that provide this sales model are in the beginning and we may be several decades away from the appearance of its main problems.

The Google Stadia service, although briefly, showed the future of digital ownership, but fortunately, Google decided to return the cost of purchasing the games of this service to the account of the users. However, Google could easily not do this and not face any legal problems.

Imagine that one day the Valve company will go bankrupt and the Steam store will be unavailable. In this situation, you will not have access to your games and you will not be able to do anything. If this unlikely scenario worries you, you’re probably well aware of the problem with digital ownership.

Of course, even now this scenario can happen in a different way. For example, if you violate Volvo’s rules and regulations, this company can block your access to your Steam account and all your games. This can also happen with video streaming services.

What can we do?

Undoubtedly, digital ownership is superior to physical ownership in many situations, but having a digital code to play games or watch serial movies can be dangerous because the selling company can easily cut off your access to the purchased content.

This problem will increase every year with the increase of digital services, and no doubt the number of stories of people who have lost access to their accounts will also increase. At this time, it is not clear what the solution is to deal with this problem, and whether there is a solution for it at all.