Introduction

I have given Amazon way too much money, including Kindle books and Audible audiobooks. My favorite audiobook is probably The Martian, by Andy Weir, which I bought on Audible in the original Podium Publishing edition read by R.C. Bray, the recording that went on to win the 2015 Audie Award for Best Science Fiction [1]. When Crown picked up the print rights and the book went mainstream, Audible negotiated its own separate audio deal, one that didn’t include Bray’s recording. Audible asked him to re-record it, the two sides couldn’t agree on a price, and Audible had Wil Wheaton record a new version instead [1][2]. The Bray edition I’d paid for came off the store over that falling-out, not over anything I did. For a while, the only version I could find in my library was the new Wheaton one I’d never bought. At some point even that stopped showing up, and today I don’t see any edition of The Martian in my account at all. No refund, no explanation, for either change.

Philips did something similar to my smart bulbs. In September 2023, Signify (the company behind Philips Hue) announced that Hue Bridge owners would soon need a Hue account just to keep controlling their lights from the app, bundled with new terms that required consenting to upload usage data to Hue’s cloud as a condition of getting that account at all [3]. People had specifically bought Hue because it didn’t require an account or a cloud connection, and the backlash was immediate enough that Signify backed off the data-sharing requirement a few weeks later and made it optional. The account requirement itself stuck anyway, rolling out through 2024 [4]. I ran into exactly that: an app update that wouldn’t let me control my own lights until I agreed to the new account terms. Local control reportedly still works without an internet connection once you’ve signed up, but my only actual choice at the moment that prompt appeared was to accept the new terms or leave my house full of smart bulbs non-functional from the app I’d always used. If I didn’t agree to whatever Philips wanted this time, they would literally leave me in the dark.

The actual workaround is to stop using Philips’s own app. Home Assistant, the open-source home automation platform, talks to a Hue Bridge over its local API and controls the same bulbs without ever touching Signify’s cloud or its account requirement, and you can go a step further and pair Hue bulbs directly to a Zigbee coordinator, skipping the Bridge entirely [5]. That the hardware I own can be fully controlled by software Philips didn’t write and never approved, while Philips’s own software holds the same hardware hostage to an account, tells you the account requirement was never a technical necessity. It’s leverage.

Both of these feel like the same violation. I paid for a thing, and the thing got worse, or disappeared, after the fact. They’re not really the same problem, though, and neither is new. What’s actually going on is that “buy” has meant something narrower than most people assume for about as long as copyright law has existed. Digital media and software-tethered hardware didn’t invent that narrowness. Physical media just used to hide it, because owning the disc or the book was real ownership, even when the work recorded on it never was.

What you’ve always actually owned

Copyright law has always drawn a line between owning a copy of a creative work and owning the work itself. When you buy a book, an LP, or a CD, you own that physical object outright. You can sell it, lend it, give it away, leave it to your kids, or put it through a wood chipper. What you don’t own is the copyright: you can’t photocopy the book and sell the copies, you can’t press your own run of the LP, you can’t put the songs in a commercial without a license.

This split exists because of the first-sale doctrine, codified at 17 U.S.C. § 109(a): once a copyright owner sells you a particular physical copy, their distribution right over that copy is exhausted. You’re free to dispose of it however you want, without needing their permission again [6].

Record labels have tried to route around this with language, not just contracts. In UMG Recordings v. Augusto, Universal mailed promotional CDs stamped “licensed to the intended recipient for personal use only” and sued a reseller who put them on eBay. The Ninth Circuit didn’t care what the label printed on the disc. UMG sent the CDs without getting anyone to agree to anything first, never tracked them, and never asked for them back, so as far as the law was concerned, that was a gift or a sale, and the first-sale doctrine applied regardless of the sticker [7].

A company’s own label on a physical object doesn’t get to redefine what the transaction legally was. Courts look at what actually happened (was possession transferred unconditionally, indefinitely, for a one-time payment), not what the fine print claims. That’s exactly the test that falls apart once “the object” is a file.

Why digital flips this

A digital purchase has no particular copy to own. When you “buy” a Kindle book or an MP3, you’re granted access to make a copy on your device, under terms that are license terms from the start. Amazon, Audible, and Apple all say so, you just never had a reason to read that section.

The Ninth Circuit formalized how to tell a license from a sale in Vernor v. Autodesk: a transfer is a license, not a sale, if the copyright owner (1) says it’s granting a license, (2) significantly restricts the user’s ability to transfer the software, and (3) imposes notable use restrictions. Timothy Vernor bought used AutoCAD discs at a bankruptcy sale and resold them on eBay; Autodesk sent Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) takedowns, arguing it only ever licensed the software. The court agreed, and ruled Vernor never owned a copy he could invoke first-sale rights over, because the people he bought from never owned one either [8].

Capitol Records v. ReDigi went further and closed off the workaround people assumed digital first-sale would look like. ReDigi built a marketplace that would “migrate” an MP3 from your computer to a buyer’s, deleting the original as it transferred, so that only one copy ever existed at a time, functionally identical to handing someone a CD. The court rejected it anyway: the instant the file is encoded onto the buyer’s disk, that’s a new reproduction, full stop, regardless of what happens to the original a moment later. Reproduction rights belong to the copyright owner, and first-sale only ever covered distributing a specific lawfully-made copy, not making a new one, so there was no digital first-sale defense to invoke in the first place [9].

Put those two rulings together and the actual shape of the thing comes into focus. There is no first-sale doctrine for pure digital files, and for software there often isn’t even a sale to apply it to. The “buy” button activates a license. What you can do with your copy, how long you keep access to it, and whether it can be taken back are all terms the seller wrote, not facts about ownership the way they were for the LP on your shelf.

Adobe’s Creative Suite shows the same dynamic playing out over years instead of overnight. Through CS6, you could buy a perpetual license and keep running that exact version indefinitely. Adobe discontinued that option and moved everyone onto Creative Cloud, a subscription it can reprice and re-term on its own schedule, with cancellation terms the FTC and Department of Justice say were deliberately obscured until a customer tried to leave; Adobe settled that case for $150 million in March 2026 [10]. Businesses that spent years building workflows, training, and file formats around Photoshop and Illustrator didn’t get to keep the old deal. They got migrated into whatever deal Adobe was currently offering, because the perpetual license wasn’t an option anymore. The frustration ran deep enough that, in 2026, a developer used AI coding tools to build free, open-source clones of seven Adobe apps from scratch [11]; that’s a different legal question from anything else in this post, since cloning functionality and interface through reverse engineering isn’t the same as a revoked license, but it’s the same underlying grievance.

My library and my living room

This is why what happened to my Audible library wasn’t a bug or an accident. It’s what the license always allowed. I’m not the only one it’s happened to. People report whole series vanishing after a publisher reissues a title under a new edition and the app stops recognizing the one they already bought, or a publisher pulling rights entirely and Audible support offering a “free” replacement credit for the book you already paid for once [12]. None of that is Audible malfunctioning. It’s the underlying publishing-rights license expiring or changing hands, and your purchase was always downstream of a license that Audible itself doesn’t fully control.

Amazon did this more visibly in 2009, when it remotely deleted copies of 1984 and Animal Farm from Kindles after discovering the reseller distributing them didn’t actually hold the rights. The irony of the title wasn’t lost on anyone. Amazon refunded buyers, Bezos personally apologized, and two Kindle owners sued; the case settled with Amazon agreeing to limit when it would do this again [13]. It was still, legally, within what the license allowed. The apology was about judgment, not obligation.

Sony did the version of this for video, pulling more than a thousand seasons of Discovery shows (MythBusters, Deadliest Catch, Cake Boss) from PlayStation libraries at the end of 2023, after a licensing deal with the network ended, with no public commitment to refund anyone who’d bought the episodes outright. Sony’s own terms describe everything in the store as licensed “on a nonexclusive and revocable basis” [14]. “Revocable” is the operative word in that sentence, and it was always there in the terms you clicked through.

Games take this one step further, because many of them need a live server to run at all, even offline single-player ones with online-only DRM checks. I lived this myself more than a decade before The Crew made headlines for it: I paid for a fun, casual space-strategy game called Galactic Reign when Windows 8 first launched, and Microsoft pulled it from the Windows Store that same year, in August 2013, after the developer, Slant Six Games, shut down. The game’s servers went dark for good the following February, and nobody offered a refund unless you pushed customer service for one [15]. The Crew was an always-online open-world racing game Ubisoft released in 2014, and when Ubisoft shut it down in 2024, it didn’t just end multiplayer. It made the entire game, including content people only ever played solo, permanently unplayable. Two players sued, and a French consumer rights group filed its own suit, arguing Ubisoft never made clear that people were buying a revocable license to access a remote service, not the game itself [16]. Ubisoft’s position in court has reportedly been blunt: the game was never yours [17]. That lawsuit, and the “Stop Killing Games” campaign it’s attached to, is asking regulators to require that games remain playable somehow after a publisher pulls the plug, which tells you there’s currently no legal requirement that they do.

When the license is attached to hardware you already own

Hue is a different animal from all of that, because there’s no file to revoke. The bulb is mine. What Philips controls is the software that makes the bulb useful in the way I bought it for (scenes, scheduling, the app, remote access), and the terms attached to that software can change after purchase in ways the hardware purchase itself never disclosed.

Philips has been explicit that requiring a Hue account is about being able to identify who’s allowed to control a given bridge and bulb set, for security and ecosystem-management reasons, and that local control keeps working without an internet connection once you’ve signed up [4]. That’s a reasonable security rationale, and it’s a real mitigation. It’s also not the point. The terms of continuing to use hardware I already paid for weren’t fixed at the point of sale. They’re whatever the manufacturer decides, revised on its own schedule, with no leverage on my side beyond walking away from hardware I already own.

This is also why you can’t just route around it yourself. The DMCA’s anti-circumvention provision, Section 1201, makes it illegal to bypass technical protection measures controlling access to copyrighted software, including the firmware running your own lightbulb, regardless of why you’re doing it. The Librarian of Congress grants narrow exemptions every three years (for farm equipment, for some vehicles, for certain repairs), but those exemptions typically only cover the act of circumventing, not making or distributing a tool that does it for you. You can legally write a script to unlock your own tractor if you’re a capable enough programmer; you can’t legally give that script to anyone else [18]. The right-to-repair movement exists largely to chip away at this one exemption category at a time, and John Deere is the case study: farmers who’d bought the tractor outright still couldn’t get it running again after a routine repair without a dealer’s software tool, which is what pushed the FTC and five states to sue Deere in January 2025 over the practice, a case Deere settled that July by agreeing to give independent repair shops the same software access its own dealers get [19].

Smart televisions have the same issue, and most buyers never knew there was anything to opt out of in the first place. Automatic content recognition (ACR) ships on by default, and turning it off usually means finding and disabling several separate settings buried under different advertising and tracking menus, not one obvious switch, which is exactly why most people never do it [20]. A study called “Watching the Watchers,” run across 12 TVs from 10 manufacturers covering roughly 95 percent of the US smart TV market, found that only four of the eight operating systems tested actually stopped collecting data when you used the TV’s own opt-out toggle. Samsung and Vizio kept sending traffic that looked like viewing surveillance anyway, and the underlying technology, ACR, kept running over HDMI even when the TV was being used as a dumb monitor for a game console or streaming box, with none of its smart features touched at all [21]. This isn’t new or hypothetical. The FTC and New Jersey fined Vizio $2.2 million back in 2017 for collecting that viewing data without consent and tying it to each household’s IP address, nearby access points, and zip code, then selling it to data brokers and advertisers after enriching it further with sex, age, income, marital status, household size, education, home ownership, and household value [22]. In 2025 the Texas Attorney General sued Sony, Samsung, LG, Hisense, and TCL under the state’s deceptive trade practices law over the same underlying practice [23]. You own the television outright. What you don’t clearly get to do is turn its surveillance off yourself: the DMCA jailbreaking exemption that already covers installing new firmware on a smart TV doesn’t clearly extend to removing a manufacturer’s ACR specifically, which is why a group called FULU has a pending petition asking the Copyright Office to add that as its own protected category in the next rulemaking cycle, due in 2027 [24]. Until that’s decided, whether you’re allowed to fix your own TV’s surveillance problem yourself is an open legal question, not a settled right.

What’s actually changing

The clearest sign that this problem is real and not just internet grumbling is that regulators have started responding to it. California’s AB 2426, effective January 1, 2025, requires sellers of digital goods to clearly disclose, before you pay, when you’re buying a revocable license rather than unrestricted ownership. No more “buy” or “purchase” language implying otherwise unless the seller gets you to affirmatively acknowledge the license terms first. A violation is a misdemeanor with civil penalties attached [25].

The FTC has separately put out a consumer alert making the same point in plain language: what you get when you click “buy” is often just a license, explained only in fine print you were never going to read [26]. Senator Ron Wyden has pushed the FTC to go further and require upfront, plain-language disclosure nationally, not just in California [27].

None of this changes what you actually get. It only changes whether you’re told clearly before you pay. That’s worth something (informed choice is still a choice), but it’s a disclosure requirement, not an ownership right. Nobody has restored digital first-sale, and nobody has required publishers or platforms to keep access alive after a licensing deal ends.

What you can actually do about it

  • For anything you genuinely want to keep owning, buy the physical object. A book, an LP, a disc. First-sale doctrine still means something there, even for an out-of-print title a publisher pulled everywhere else.
  • Buy DRM-free where it’s an option. Bandcamp sells files you can actually keep without a license check-in; some ebook and game storefronts (GOG, for instance) sell DRM-free as a stated policy rather than an accident.
  • Treat “subscribe” and “buy” as the same transaction with different billing cycles, for anything delivered through an app you don’t control. If the access can be revoked, you’re renting, whatever the button says.
  • Before buying hardware that depends on an app or cloud account to function (smart bulbs, locks, thermostats, cameras), assume the terms you’re agreeing to on day one aren’t the terms you’ll be living under in year three. That’s not a reason to avoid all of it; it’s a reason to pick products from companies with a track record of not using that leverage badly.
  • Read the one paragraph that matters. You don’t need to read an entire terms-of-service document. You need to find the sentence that says “license” and the sentence that describes when it can be revoked. They’re almost always both in there.
  • If you want the law itself to catch up, say so during the comment period. The Copyright Office is mid-cycle on its Tenth Triennial Section 1201 rulemaking right now, and it takes public comments on every pending exemption petition, not just one. FULU’s petition to allow removing ACR from smart TVs is a timely example, but it’s one of many worth weighing in on. Comments supporting a petition are due December 7, 2026, filed through Regulations.gov per the Office’s instructions [28].

I’m not anti-digital

I’m a software developer who tinkers with electronics for fun, so I live in this digital world by choice. I buy digital books and plenty of software I only ever “license” in the legal sense, and I stream most of the music I listen to. When I actually buy music these days, it’s usually a physical copy. The convenience of digital is real and I’m not giving it up. What I don’t do is assume the word “buy” on a checkout button means what it means at a bookstore. It doesn’t, it hasn’t for a long time, and the law has been consistent about that even when the marketing hasn’t been. Knowing which one you’re actually getting, before you pay, is the whole ask.

This is general information and opinion, not legal advice.

References

  1. Background on the original Podium Publishing/R.C. Bray audiobook deal, its 2015 Audie Award win, and the rights dispute with Audible that led to a new narration. Publishers Weekly, “The Martian’s Chronicle”.
  2. Announcement of Wil Wheaton’s replacement narration of The Martian for Audible. Space.com, “‘Star Trek’s’ Wil Wheaton narrates new ‘The Martian’ audiobook by Andy Weir”.
  3. Signify’s September 2023 announcement that Hue accounts would become mandatory, bundled with a since-reversed mandatory cloud data-sharing requirement. Home Assistant, “Philips Hue will force users to upload their data to Hue cloud”.
  4. Philips Hue’s mandatory account requirement and stated rationale. Hueblog, “Philips Hue soon only usable with account?”; Philips Hue, “Explore Hue: Accounts”.
  5. Home Assistant’s local-API Hue Bridge integration, and pairing Hue bulbs directly to a Zigbee coordinator without a Bridge. Home Assistant Guide, “The Philips Hue Integration with Home Assistant”; JoinHomeshift, “Philips Hue + Home Assistant: The Complete 2026 Integration Guide”.
  6. 17 U.S.C. § 109(a), Limitations on exclusive rights: Effect of transfer of particular copy or phonorecord. Text via U.S. Courts Ninth Circuit Model Jury Instructions, 17.28.
  7. UMG Recordings, Inc. v. Augusto, 628 F.3d 1175 (9th Cir. 2011). Summary via National Law Review and Wikipedia.
  8. Vernor v. Autodesk, Inc., 621 F.3d 1102 (9th Cir. 2010). Summary via SD Times and Fenwick & West.
  9. Capitol Records, LLC v. ReDigi Inc., 934 F. Supp. 2d 640 (S.D.N.Y. 2013). Summary via Eric Goldman’s Technology & Marketing Law Blog.
  10. DOJ/FTC suit against Adobe over Creative Cloud subscription cancellation practices, filed June 17, 2024, settled for $150 million in March 2026. Alston & Bird, “Adobe Service Focus of FTC Action”; mlex, “Adobe can’t dodge US FTC’s claims it trapped customers in subscriptions, judge rules”.
  11. “ArtCraft” open-source Adobe app clones, built by developer Brandon Thomas using Claude Opus 5.5. TechSpot, “‘Software is over’: Developer uses AI to build free Adobe clones after frustration with cancellation fees”.
  12. Reader-reported Audible library removals and reissue/ASIN mismatches. Goodreads discussion thread, “The Audible Triangle”.
  13. Amazon’s 2009 remote deletion of Kindle copies of 1984 and Animal Farm. eWeek, “Amazon Offers Refund for Deleted Copies of Orwell Novels”; eWeek, “Amazon CEO Bezos Apologizes for Orwell Deletion from Kindle”; The Register, original 2009 report.
  14. Sony’s removal of purchased Discovery Channel content from PlayStation libraries, effective December 31, 2023. BGR, “PlayStation Is Deleting Purchased Shows From User Libraries, And People Are Furious”; Thurrott, “PlayStation Users Will Soon Lose Access to All Purchased Discovery Content”.
  15. Galactic Reign, delisted from the Windows Store on August 15, 2013 following developer Slant Six Games’ closure, with servers shut down permanently on February 28, 2014. Windows Central, “Microsoft cancelling unique space battle game Galactic Reign in three days; servers offline by January”; DelistedGames.com, “Galactic Reign”.
  16. Lawsuits over Ubisoft’s 2024 shutdown of The Crew, including suit by French consumer group UFC-Que Choisir. 80.lv, “Players Sue Ubisoft for Shutting Down The Crew”; Gigazine, coverage of the class action.
  17. Ubisoft’s courtroom position on The Crew ownership. Gigazine, “Ubisoft takes firm stance in The Crew lawsuit: ‘The game is not yours’”.
  18. DMCA § 1201 anti-circumvention provisions and the right-to-repair exemption process. LexPlug outline, “Exemptions (Security Research, Right to Repair)”; Klemchuk LLP, “Anti-Circumvention Exemptions: A Powerful Exemption to DMCA”.
  19. FTC and five states’ January 2025 lawsuit against John Deere over repair restrictions, settled July 2025. Corridor Business Journal, “John Deere settles with FTC, states over right to repair suit”.
  20. ACR’s default-on status across brands and the complexity of opting out across multiple separate settings. Tom’s Guide, “Your TV is watching you — how to turn off data collection on LG, Samsung, Roku and more”; CyberNews, “Your TV is spying on you: here’s how to make it stop”.
  21. “Watching the Watchers,” a study of ACR opt-out effectiveness and HDMI-only tracking across smart TV operating systems. Malwarebytes, “Vizio, Samsung smart TVs seem to ignore tracking opt outs”; CyberInsider, “Smart TV privacy study finds tracking persists even when opting out”.
  22. FTC and New Jersey’s 2017 settlement with Vizio over non-consensual ACR data collection and sale. JD Supra, “Vizio Pays $2.2 Million To Settle With The FTC Over Its Data Collection And Sharing Practices”.
  23. Texas Attorney General’s 2025 suit against Sony, Samsung, LG, Hisense, and TCL over ACR data collection, under the Texas Deceptive Trade Practices Act. The Record, “Texas sues 5 smart TV makers over ACR tech”.
  24. FULU’s petition to the U.S. Copyright Office for a DMCA § 1201 exemption permitting removal of ACR software from smart TVs, pending in the 2027 triennial rulemaking cycle. U.S. Copyright Office, FULU Class 7 Petition (PDF).
  25. California AB 2426, effective January 1, 2025. Greenberg Traurig, “AB 2426: New California Law Requires Clear Licensing Disclosures for Digital Goods”; ABC7, “Gov. Newsom signs law forcing digital stores to admit you’re buying media licenses only”.
  26. FTC consumer alert on digital purchase licensing. Referenced via Public Knowledge, “The Great Big Beautiful Lie (of Digital Purchases)”.
  27. Senator Ron Wyden’s letter to the FTC on digital ownership transparency. Public Knowledge, letter PDF.
  28. Comment submission instructions and deadlines for the Tenth Triennial Section 1201 Proceeding, 2027 cycle. U.S. Copyright Office, “Tenth Triennial Section 1201 Proceeding, 2027 Cycle: Comment Submission”.