We need to talk about digital ownership

Digital ownership is used to mean many different things, so people should name the specific rights they mean. For consumers, the rights are ongoing access, availability, and resale, illustrated by Amazon's terms warning that purchased content "may become unavailable" and by online games that stop working when servers shut down. For creators, the rights are copyright, licensing, sellability, accessibility, portability, destructibility, and sovereignty, with sovereignty illustrated by a newsletter that moved from Substack while keeping its subscribers.