Sony Says You Don't Own the Games You Bought. Crypto Says It Can Fix That

In brief

• Sony has argued in court that players don't own the digital games they buy, the latest flashpoint in a long-running dispute over digital ownership.
• Traditional property law protections against seizure don't apply to digital assets, leaving platform operators free to revoke or edit content a user has paid for.
• NFTs give users a verifiable, self-held record of ownership, but public metadata and reliance on centrally hosted files have limited that promise—problems that encrypted NFTs are being pitched to solve.

News that Sony is arguing in court that digital games can’t be owned by players that bought them is the latest front in an ongoing battle over digital ownership.

That tussle is "still in its early innings,” Kostas Chalkias, Co-Founder and Chief Cryptographer at Mysten Labs, told Decrypt. “With media, we're used to renting and streaming, and we're increasingly finding that the things we think we're buying don't actually belong to us.”

It’s an issue that stretches across media beyond video games. As far back as 2009, Amazon Kindle owners were surprised to find that their ebook copies of—of all things—George Orwell’s “Nineteen Eighty-Four” had been remotely deleted as a result of a rights issue. Amazon has continued to tinker with ebook content, with works by Roald Dahl, Agatha Christie, and R.L. Stine among those remotely edited by publishers since.