You Will Own Nothing: DRM, Kill Switches, Privacy Erosion, and the Fight Over Real Ownership
In late June 2026, Sony notified PlayStation users that more than 550 Studio Canal movies and shows they had previously “purchased”—including Terminator 2: Judgment Day, Paddington, Evil Dead, Hot Fuzz, and Pan’s Labyrinth—would be removed from their libraries on September 1. No refunds. The reason given was the end of a licensing agreement. Customers who had clicked “Buy” discovered, once again, that they had only bought a revocable license.
This episode is not an outlier. It is a visible symptom of a deeper shift: the replacement of ownership with managed access, enforced by digital rights management (DRM), always-online requirements, remote control systems, and continuous data collection. For a tech-savvy and privacy-conscious audience, the mechanics matter as much as the principle.
How DRM Actually Works—and Why It Destroys Privacy
Traditional physical ownership is simple. You buy a book, a DVD, or a game disc. You can read it, watch it, or play it offline, lend it, sell it, or keep it indefinitely. No one needs to know you still possess it.
DRM reverses this. Most modern digital “purchases” bind the content to an account, a set of authorized devices, and often a continuous or periodic connection to the seller’s servers. The system must verify that the user still has permission. That verification is not free of cost to privacy.
Typical DRM and related systems collect or can collect:
- Device identifiers and hardware fingerprints
- IP addresses and approximate location
- Account activity and authentication events
- Usage patterns (what was played, when, for how long, on which device)
- Sometimes more granular behavioral data when the same platform also serves recommendations or advertising
Always-online or “phone-home” DRM goes further. Some games and software refuse to launch, or periodically re-authenticate, without reaching a remote server. If the server is down, the company goes out of business, or the license terms change, the product stops working, even though the files remain on the user’s storage. In this situation the user is no longer the final authority over the copy they paid for; the platform is.
Circumventing these controls is generally illegal under laws such as Section 1201 of the U.S. Digital Millennium Copyright Act, a national enabling act of the WIPO Copyright Treaty. Regardless of whether the underlying use would otherwise be lawful (for example, making a personal backup or accessing content after a platform shuts down). The legal structure protects the technological lock more robustly than it protects the consumer’s reasonable expectation of continued access.
The result is a quiet form of surveillance baked into ordinary consumption. Every time a user wants to watch a film, play a game, or open a document they “own,” the system may report back. Privacy is not merely at risk of breach; it is structurally incompatible with the enforcement model that these companies and national governments have allowed to exist.
Vehicles: From Ownership to Remote Permission
The same logic has moved into physical machines that once felt unambiguously owned.
Modern vehicles are now software-defined. Critical functions such as performance modes, driver-assistance features, even certain comfort options such as heated seats, are in many ways gated behind subscriptions and can enabled or disabled over the air. Manufacturers already possess, through telematics systems, the technical ability to locate vehicles, push updates, and in many cases prevent a vehicle from restarting (used for theft recovery or, in some financing arrangements, for repossession).
In the United States, the 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act requires technology in new vehicles that can detect impaired driving and “prevent or limit” operation. Implementation rules have been delayed and contested, and while the law does not grant the government a general remote “kill switch” under its direct control it is Nevertheless, the underlying capability software that can restrict vehicle operation is being standardized though. When combined with existing manufacturer telematics, the architecture for remote intervention already exists in most new cars.
In the European Union, regulations emphasize driver monitoring for distraction and cybersecurity requirements for connected vehicles (including UNECE rules on software updates). Full remote government kill switches are not the formal requirement, yet the same connected architecture creates the possibility of remote immobilization by manufacturers or, under certain legal processes for government authorities. Anti-theft immobilizers and over-the-air control systems are in widespread use.
The privacy dimension is nonexistent now with these connected cars as they generate continuous streams of location, driving behavior, and diagnostic data. When functionality itself depends on that connection and on the manufacturer’s servers, the vehicle owner becomes a perpetual data subject of the company that sold the machine. Ownership of the hardware no longer guarantees independent control of its operation.
The EU Right to Repair: A Partial Counter-Current
Not every regulatory development points in the same direction. On 31 July 2026, the EU’s Right to Repair Directive (Directive 2024/1799) begins to apply across Member States.
Manufacturers of listed products—large household appliances (washing machines, dishwashers, refrigerators, tumble dryers), vacuum cleaners, televisions and electronic displays, smartphones, tablets, servers and data storage products, and certain light electric vehicles such as e-bikes and e-scooters must offer repair at a reasonable price and within a reasonable time, even after the legal guarantee period. Spare parts must remain available for defined periods (for example, seven years for smartphones, longer for some other appliances). Choosing repair during the guarantee period extends that guarantee by at least one year. Software and hardware measures that deliberately hinder legitimate repair are restricted for covered products.
This is a meaningful step toward durability and against pure planned obsolescence. It does not, however, restore full ownership in the classical sense. Cars however, remain largely outside the core obligations of this directive. Digital content and pure software licenses are not covered too. The rules still leave manufacturers with significant control over parts pricing, diagnostic tools, and the deeper software layers that increasingly define product behavior. Right to repair improves the ability to keep a device functioning; but it does not eliminate remote kill capabilities, subscription locks, or the data collection that accompanies connectivity.
What Is at Stake
For a privacy-focused and technically literate audience, the pattern is crystal clear. DRM, always-online authentication, software-defined vehicles, and remote management systems convert one-time transactions into ongoing relationships of dependency and observation. The buyer only receives temporary, conditional access, whereas the seller retains the ability to revoke, monitor, update, or selectively disable the product at will.
True ownership must always include the right to use a thing without continuous permission, to keep it offline, to repair it, to modify it within the bounds of ordinary property rights, and to do so without generating a telemetry stream for a third party. When those attributes are stripped away, what remains is closer to a lease with extensive surveillance attached. Liberland’s still unratified Universal Principles of Liberty underpins this right as an inviolable right.
Sony’s deletion of purchased films is only the most recent public illustration. The same architecture appears in games that die when servers close, in cars whose features and operability can be altered remotely, and in a growing range of devices that cease to function fully without corporate approval. The EU’s new repair rules offer limited pushback on durability for some categories of goods. They do not reverse the deeper trend toward licensed, observable, and revocable access.
A free society depends on the practical ability of individuals to control the tools and media they acquire. When that control is steadily relocated to platforms, manufacturers, and licensing entities—and when the price of access is continuous data disclosure—the loss is not merely commercial inconvenience. It is a reduction in personal autonomy. The technology makes the old promise of ownership look increasingly quaint. The question is whether people will continue to accept the language of “purchase” when the underlying reality has already moved on.