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Why products, pricing, and shopping behavior look the way they do now.
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A DVD you paid for can be sold, lent, or left in a will. A movie you 'bought' in an app often cannot. The change is not a vibe about modern life. It is a sequence of copyright rulings, license agreements, and a 2025 California disclosure law that finally admitted the word 'buy' had come unstuck from the legal fact.
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The argumentUS copyright's first-sale doctrine still lets you resell a lawfully made physical copy. Starting with software license cases such as Vernor v. Autodesk (2010) and the Second Circuit's ReDigi decision (2018), courts treated many digital transfers as licenses or as new copies, which puts them outside first sale. Streaming then replaced the disc economically: in 2024, US physical home-video product fell below $1 billion while subscription streaming accounted for 91.3 percent of home-entertainment spending. The word 'buy' lagged behind the contract, which is why California now restricts that word for revocable digital goods.
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