I think Cory Doctorow nailed the formulation here:
If buying isn't owning, piracy isn't stealing.
Otherwise, if there are no negative consequences for a company deleting everyone's purchases, what will stop them from doing it every year just to boost profits?
You do not own anything someone or something (companies) else has the legal ownership and rights to. This is something way different that distribution rights as well.
They 'may' grant you a license. Depending on the terms and conditions that license may bind you to all kinds of legal mumbo jumbo and stuff. This applies to games, music, movies, books, other forms of media, etcetera.
Why this is such a complex thing? Because companies made it as complex as possible to avoid easy legal battles, taxes and other things related to money. The more complexity, the more time it will cost before someone else finds out there is something wrong. And by that time, the company or the responsible people may be long gone. Hurray for money.
Piracy is not stealing. You do not steal anything. You bypass legal ownership, dsitribution rights and licenses by pirating. Which is illegal and punishable in most location on this happy planet. If they find out. And want to do something about it. Or can do something about it. Complexity is not a patented idea. Many people can play that game.
I do hope in the Star Trek universe they had no licensed copyright system on their transporters. Your freshly beamed you may not be your property anymore. That would make a fun SNL sketch where Picard has to fight the lawyers after beaming to some planet.
The issue for me is: The button you click in the online store says: "Buy". So you bought it.
The industry can make up whenever bullshit "license agreement" they want and they can even corruptly get the government to take their side in disputes, but the small print can't totally negate the big print. And you can't steal something you already bought.
That said: I personally buy everything I can on disc because I'm never going to win this, haha
Ok, but you don't own the actual thing. If I buy a copy of Star Wars on DVD I obviously don't own the movie itself. I only own a copy and the right to use that copy in certain ways; typically personal & fair use.
Historically, producing the copies themselves was generally so expensive that it made whatever licensing access essentially inconsequential. The media itself was inherently a perpetual license.
As we have moved towards the availability of cheaper and cheaper copies, this is no longer the case. Copies of a work can now be so cheap and easy to create/distribute that simple possession of a copy of the work being equivalent to possession of a license no longer makes sense.
The objectively correct way to handle this is to establish a shared cooperative system of identification and proof-of-purchase.
For example: I should be able to buy a regular perpetual personal use license for a certain work in a certain format (ie: Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope—1997 Special Edition) from the owner of that work (currently Disney) then present that license or proof-of-purchase to any provider (ie: Netflix) to receive a copy of that work in that format.
If the license is not tied to a physical object that you can safekeep, then it has none of the traditional benefits of ownership as you can only exercise your license through a stack that others make available. That's the real issue here.
I know. Unless the company has made a perpetual accessible portal/download thing where you can obtain your licensed product forever, it's doomed to fail sometime.
Mediums like discs (cd, dvd, blu-ray, etc) are usually defined as a assistance to make it easy for the consumer to actually use the licensed content (play the movie, install the game). However, these disc deteriorate over time and you may end up with a license, but no data.
I was always amazed they have this machine that can deconstruct and reconstruct any form of matter into data, even actually living and moving matter, to great distances at will and they have these weird problems in the episodes.
Construction problems? Population problems? Food and water shortage? Need more dilithium crystlals? Need more transporter machines? Copy/paste the data and just beam the stuff to where you want it.
Also, this is the same old false equivalence - taking a copy of something is NOT the same as taking the original, where only one instance of an item can exist and taking it deprives the original owner of their possessional.
If buying isn't owning, piracy isn't stealing.
Otherwise, if there are no negative consequences for a company deleting everyone's purchases, what will stop them from doing it every year just to boost profits?