Sony Says You Don't Own Your Games. Crypto Has Been Waiting for This Moment 🎮

Sony's legal argument that players do not own the digital games they purchase is the latest flashpoint in a broader fight over digital ownership, according to reporting by Decrypt. "It's still in its early innings," Kostas Chalkias, Co-Founder and Chief Cryptographer at Mysten Labs, told Decrypt, adding that consumers are increasingly discovering that what they treat as a purchase is effectively a revocable license.

The pattern extends well beyond gaming. As far back as 2009, Amazon remotely deleted copies of George Orwell's "Nineteen Eighty-Four" from Kindle devices over a rights dispute. Amazon has continued to modify ebook content since, with works by Roald Dahl, Agatha Christie, and R.L. Stine among those remotely edited by publishers. Film and TV libraries have been purged from consumer accounts for reasons including politically sensitive content, and streaming platforms have retroactively adjusted titles after release. Music services have shifted consumption from ownership to access, according to Canoe founder Jess Zhang, while industry executive Sammy Andrews said royalties pay out the same regardless of listener engagement, a system that "rewards share of volume, not depth of connection."

Some directors, including Christopher Nolan and Guillermo del Toro, have championed physical media as a workaround. Others argue the underlying issue is centralized control. "When you 'purchase' a digital asset from a digital platform, the platform ultimately retains control of the asset, and your 'ownership' title is nothing but a revocable entry on the platform's database," said Primavera De Filippi, Director of Research at CERSA. She added that traditional property law protections against arbitrary seizure do not apply to digital goods, meaning "the platform operator can take property away via a simple line of code, without having to justify it on any legal ground, or even modify the content of these digital assets, without the users' consent or knowledge."

Blockchain proponents say decentralized infrastructure offers an alternative. "Blockchain and Web3 gives consumers a clear path to owning a digital copy of a specific good, whether that is a game, a song or a movie," Zhang told Decrypt. NFTs were initially pitched as a broad solution, though the technology has so far failed to gain widespread traction for mainstream digital media ownership.