Ownership of digital goods is back as a serious debate

The physical media thread today was not really about Blu-rays. It was about the long-running anxiety that digital purchases are licenses in disguise: revocable, editable, and fragile. The thread covered the standard arguments, streaming services deleting content, games going offline, ebooks being recalled, and arrived at a position many HN readers clearly share: physical media is the only durable form of ownership for cultural goods. Several commenters went further and endorsed piracy as the practical resolution to the licensing quagmire.

This same anxiety runs through the DNS resolver thread, where commenters pushed for decentralization as a default practice. And it connects to the age-verification thread about kids going online, where the question of who controls access to the internet is front and center. The through-line is a widespread distrust of centralized control over things people thought they owned or could freely use.

The counterpoint in the thread is that ownership has always been a legal construct, and IP law means you never owned the content anyway. That is technically correct and practically useless for someone whose purchased movie library disappeared when a service shut down.