In October 2026, the word “buy” got a chance to reclaim its meaning. New York Democratic congressman Ritchie Torres introduced the Power to the Players Act: if a button says “Buy Now,” the buyer must receive actual ownership rights—not a revocable license. Either restore a game’s status as a thing, or admit it honestly: you are renting it out. Torres himself put it bluntly: a game that can be taken away the moment a company pulls the plug is not a purchase, but a rental disguised as a sale.
The bill did not emerge from nowhere. In 2024, California had already passed AB 2426: the law prohibits digital storefronts from using “buy” and “purchase” in their interfaces if the buyer is in fact receiving a license that the seller can revoke. The people we hired with our taxes officially ruled: the public believes a “buy” button sells them a thing, and corporations have been successfully monetizing that belief by selling... the absence of a thing.
And Sony, in court filings for a class action (arguments heard August 21, 2026), explained that the “reasonable consumer” knows perfectly well that they are buying only a license, so there is no deception; meanwhile, the case is being shoved into arbitration. In March 2024, Ubisoft shut down the servers for The Crew—and players’ discs around the world turned into handsome but useless blanks. California residents, of course, understood what they were buying too. It is just that corporations and buyers had reached rather different understandings of what, exactly, that was.
But look deeper and the “Buy” button turns out to be a relic of the 20th century, a legal anomaly that survives to this day only because property law failed to keep pace with the media formats changing between 1908 and 2012. The story of this button is the story of ownership splitting into three institutions: copyright, contract, and the authentication server. And of courts spending a hundred years carefully establishing what vendors now prefer not to notice.
Why does the law even have a concept called the first-sale doctrine? In 1908, publisher Bobbs-Merrill sold the novel The Castaway with a notice: “The price of this book at retail is one dollar. No dealer is licensed to sell it at a less price, and a sale at a less price will be treated as an infringement of the copyright.” Straus stores sold the book for 89 cents. The publishers sued, insisting that their control followed the book throughout the entire chain—from warehouse to bookshelf. The U.S. Supreme Court replied: no. Once the copyright holder has sold a particular copy, its control over that copy is exhausted. The buyer is free to resell it, give it away, or burn it.
In 1976, the principle was codified in §109(a) of the Copyright Act: “the owner of a particular copy” may dispose of it without asking the copyright holder. The entire used-book industry, thrift shops, video rental stores, and GameStop’s “Trade In” shelf grew out of that clause.
Notice the delicacy of the wording: the right belongs not to the “buyer,” but to the owner of a particular physical copy. The right is tethered to the atom: on paper, to the spine; on a disc, to the lacquer. A brilliantly simple construction for a world where one copy differs from another by its stamp number. And it quietly breaks in a world where there are no atoms.
In 2011, the startup ReDigi devised what seemed like a clean solution for digitally reselling music. People had spent years accumulating tracks in iTunes—and could neither sell them nor leave them in a will. ReDigi built a marketplace where the seller uploaded a file to the company’s server; the engineering was meticulous: the file was transferred and deleted from the seller’s drive in a stream, piece by piece; the scanner would not approve the transaction until it was certain the seller had no copies left. At no point in the transaction did the file exist in two places at once. In terms of copy arithmetic, the file had simply moved. Only tracks purchased through iTunes were allowed in; pirates were filtered out.
Capitol Records sued, and in 2013 Judge Richard Sullivan (S.D.N.Y., decision of March 30) handed down a verdict worth reading as perverse poetry. Formally, he did not dispute the engineering—he reminded everyone that the reproduction right is “the exclusive right to embody the work in a new material object.” Then he uttered the sentence that killed the dream of a digital flea market: the fact that a file has moved from one material object to another means reproduction has taken place.
In Sullivan’s legal universe, then, there is no such thing as moving a digital file. There is only an endless chain of copies: every “move” is the death of an original and the birth of a clone. One commentator on the case compared digital transfer to the transporter in Star Trek: the one who “moves” to the other end is a new instance, assembled from a pattern while the original is broken down into atoms. With people, we imagine continuity; with an mp3, no illusion remains. If copying is reproduction, first sale does not apply: §109 extinguishes only the distribution right, not the reproduction right. And a new embodiment is always reproduction. Beautiful axiomatic logic: you cannot own a digital thing, because you can only own a “particular copy,” and by definition no particular copy exists in the digital realm.
The Second Circuit upheld the ruling in December 2018 (910 F.3d 649). A curious touch: Google tried to file an amicus brief, warning that the decision would wreck the $41 billion cloud computing industry. Sullivan rejected the brief—the parties could speak for themselves. The cloud industry, as you can see, survived. The right of resale did not.
While the New York court was untangling music, the Ninth Circuit added another nightmare detail in 2010. Timothy Vernor was reselling old boxed copies of AutoCAD on eBay, bought at clearance sales. Autodesk objected: these were licenses, not sold copies. The appellate decision (621 F.3d 1102) formulated a three-part test: does the copyright holder state in the agreement that the user is granted a license; does it significantly restrict the right to resell; does it impose notable restrictions on use. If yes—there was no sale, ownership never arose, and first sale does not apply.
The moral: all a seller needs is one phrase in a contract—“license, non-transferable”—to remain forever the owner of every “thing” it has sold. The EULA became a spell.
You might think the Old World would behave more sensibly. In 2012, the Court of Justice of the European Union in UsedSoft v. Oracle (C-128/11) issued a ruling that American lawyers might weep over with envy: if a copyright holder sells a copy of a program—whether on disc or by download—for a one-time payment and in perpetuity, it has sold it outright. The distribution right is exhausted; an Oracle “used” license can be resold, and even a “non-transferable license” clause cannot save anyone.
But this was a special case: the court was looking at a lex specialis—Directive 2009/24 on the legal protection of computer programs—and it was drafted more generously than the rest of the law. Then came Tom Kabinet in 2019 (C-263/18, Grand Chamber): a Dutch marketplace for “used” e-books. The court reasoned that supplying an e-book by download “for permanent use” is not “distribution” (Article 4 of Directive 2001/29), but “communication to the public” (Article 3(1))—and that right is never exhausted (Article 3(3)).
The court’s reasoning is charmingly cynical (para. 58, citing the Advocate General’s Opinion, para. 89): dematerialized copies, unlike paper ones, do not deteriorate; a “used” copy is a perfect substitute for a new one; a parallel market would undermine copyright holders’ interests more severely than the antiquarian-book market does. That is precisely why the 1996 WCT defined “copies” only as “material objects which can be put into circulation.” No atom—no resale. It all makes perfect sense if owning a thing means holding on to an atom.
Now watch closely. In the EU, software is resellable (UsedSoft). An e-book is not (Tom Kabinet). And a video game? In 2014, in Nintendo v. PC Box (C-355/12), the same court ruled that a game is a “complex matter” incorporating graphic and sound elements with “unique creative value” irreducible to code. The ruling has a reverse side Europe realized too late: if a game is not a program, then the generous Directive 2009/24 does not apply to it either—which means UsedSoft cannot be extended to games.
In the autumn of 2015, UFC-Que Choisir, a French consumer organization, wrested a symbolic title from Valve: the Paris Tribunal de grande instance ruled that a Steam “perpetual license” was a sale, and users had a right to resell. The moment of enlightenment lasted three years. The Paris Court of Appeal (October 21, 2022) and the Cour de cassation (October 23, 2024) closed the case for good: games are not computer programs (PC Box), the general Directive 2001/29 applies, and under Tom Kabinet digital copies cannot be resold. Meanwhile, the European Commission, responding to the Stop Destroying Videogames citizens’ initiative (1 294 188 verified signatures; public hearing in the European Parliament—April 16, 2026), replied in a letter on June 16, 2026: it cannot yet require publishers to keep games playable; at most, there may be an “industry code of conduct” by the end of 2026. A million signatures—and the response is a polite “let’s work out some recommendations.”
Why call this rust? Because owning a digital thing today is an ensemble of three components, and none of them truly belongs to you:
What makes this moment unique is that the American copyright establishment itself accidentally acknowledged the construction. In 2024, the latest triennial rulemaking under §1201 of the DMCA produced an exemption (37 CFR §201.40(b)(19)): if a copyright holder has “ceased to provide access to an external server that is necessary for authentication,” citizens may circumvent DRM, copy, and modify the program in order to restore a game to “personal, local gameplay”; libraries and archives may preserve such games in playable form. Think about that: a federal regulator officially defined a class of “dying games”—in the federal code itself. In other words, the state itself has acknowledged: a “purchased” game can die, and setting it adrift is fine. The silent euthanasia of the “perpetual ownership” model.
In the old joke, “execute cannot pardon,” the comma is the clue. Here, the vendor places the comma when you press “Buy Now”: “Own, do not license.” And every few years, it can place it all over again, patching the terms over the air.
Torres’s bill is the first attempt in a century to move that comma by statute: so that the “buy” button either promises genuine ownership, including the right to play after a server shutdown, or honestly calls itself a “rent” button. Torres points to a fresh example: NBA 2K25 ($69.99) will be pulled from storefronts on October 30, and its servers will be shut down on December 31—two years after release. The bill’s odds, as usual, are inversely proportional to the industry’s lobbying budgets—but what matters is something else: for the first time, the legal fiction is being repaired with the same kind of rule that built it.
While the repairs are underway, the precise consumer translation of the Buy button looks like this: you give money for something that can be taken from you at any moment—and the law recognizes that as reasonable. The irony is that the most honest consumer interface of 2026 is not on Steam or in the PlayStation Store, but in the U.S. federal code: §201.40(b)(19)—a footnote where the state admits: yes, a publisher can bury a game; you may dig it up yourself.