Ownership 2.0: A Gamer, a Librarian, and a Random Mum Walk Into a Bar…

A video gamer, a librarian, and a random mum walk into a bar. That could be the start of a great joke. Sadly, it is not. It reflects a convergence of interests that most EU policymakers have not yet noticed: three communities, fighting separately, over the same broken promise. The European Parliament’s IMCO Committee meets today, 24 June 2026, to examine digital ownership under the heading “Ownership 2.0.” What that entails, whether the Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) know it or not, is a single question with three faces: can you actually own what you pay for in a digital market, and can you pass it on to the people you love when you are gone?

You Buy It, You Own It: The Promise That Has Been Quietly Broken

The principle that you pay for something and you own it is so foundational to commercial life that it rarely needs stating. When you buy a book, it sits on your shelf indefinitely, accumulates pencil marks, and can be handed to your daughter when she is old enough to read it. When you buy a vinyl record, it does not expire. When a library acquires a physical collection, it can lend those books for decades, share them with other institutions, and preserve them for researchers who have not yet been born.

The shift to digital has broken this promise across the board, and it has done so through the same mechanism in each case: replacing a sale with a licence. A licence looks like a purchase at the point of transaction. You pay a price, you receive access, and the experience of using the content feels close to ownership. The terms governing that access, however, vest the seller with the right to modify, restrict, or revoke it at will. The consumer did not buy the thing. They rented an experience, under conditions they almost certainly did not read, for a duration the seller alone determines.

The consequences of this shift extend beyond inconvenience. They reach the question of what we will be able to remember, verify, and pass on: as individuals, as institutions, and as a society.

The Gamer Whose Library Disappeared

The Stop Killing Games European Citizens’ Initiative reached over one million signatures on a precise complaint: video games that consumers had paid for were being rendered unplayable when publishers shut down the servers those games required to function. Server dependency is an architectural choice, not a technical inevitability. It is also a business choice: it builds in a form of obsolescence that nudges consumers towards new purchases rather than sustaining old ones.

The Commission’s response, published on 16 June 2026, declined to propose legislation. It cited existing intellectual property rights as the barrier, which places the Commission in the circular position of explaining that it cannot change the consumer outcome because of rules it has chosen not to change. What it offers instead, a code of conduct for the industry, an awareness campaign, and a report on the Digital Content Directive, carries some value in isolation. None of it changes the architecture.

There is a legacy dimension here that tends to get lost in the technical argument. A gamer who has spent fifteen years building a digital library cannot leave that library to anyone. The licences terminate. The collection, however large and carefully assembled, has no legal existence beyond the account that holds it. The physical equivalent, a room of cartridges and cases, would pass to heirs without question. The digital one disappears. The gamer paid market price, across hundreds of transactions, for something that will outlast neither the publisher’s commercial interest nor the gamer’s own life.

The Librarian Whose Collection Is Not Hers

Libraries have been living this problem for longer than gaming has existed as a digital industry. The shift from owning physical stock to licensing digital content was, for libraries, a shift from stewardship to dependency.

A library that bought books owned them. It could lend them, preserve them, share them with other institutions, and keep them indefinitely without requesting permission. The same library’s ebook collection exists only for as long as the publisher chooses to license it, at terms the publisher can revise, at prices that Knowledge Rights 21 (KR21) has documented running from 300 to over 1000 percent above consumer rates. Contract terms routinely override rights that copyright law grants to libraries. Content is withdrawn mid-term of an academic year, without notice, sometimes even mid-loan.

The Our Future Memory statement, signed by memory institutions across four continents, accurately frames this as a rights question: libraries, archives, and museums must be able to collect, preserve, provide access to, and cooperate around digital materials just as they always have with physical ones. The statement exists because all four of those capacities have been systematically eroded by the same licensing logic.

The legacy dimension applies here with even greater weight. When a great physical library passes its collection to a successor institution, that collection endures. When the licensing agreements governing a digital collection lapse, the collection ceases to exist for the institutions that inherit the library’s mission. A society that moves its cultural record entirely to licensed digital formats is building its memory on an unstable foundation.

The Mum Who Cannot Give Her Children Her Content Legacy

She bought films for her children when they were small, music she had loved since her twenties, and ebooks she never quite got around to reading. When digitisation arrived she embraced it fully: carefully curated playlists by mood, genre and occasion, multiple subscriptions to stream video, and a digital shelf she added to steadily for years. She paid market price throughout, and understood herself to be doing what consumers have always done: accumulating a cultural life that would outlast the moment of purchase.

When she decided to re-explore vinyl, the first thing she did was go to her own mother’s attic and sift through the remaining boxes: an eclectic inheritance, preserved without a licensing agreement, accessible without an account, waiting in the dark for decades. The collection was there. The discovery was possible. Something of a life was legible in those boxes.

In contrast, she cannot give any of her digital library to her children when she is gone. There is no attic to search, no boxes to sift through, no eclectic collection to discover.

The legal position across most digital platforms is unambiguous: content accessed under licence does not form part of an estate. The item was never owned, so there is nothing to pass on. The gamer’s library, the librarian’s collection, and the mum’s forty years of films and music share the same legal status: they exist for as long as the platform decides they do, and for no longer.

The EU Digital Fairness Act Cannot Split the Difference

The Digital Fairness Act (DFA) is the most direct legislative vehicle to address this structural problem. Its risk is that it addresses the consumer dimension in isolation, leaving the library question to copyright reform and the gaming question to a voluntary code, and producing three partial solutions where one complete framing was available.

For consumers, the DFA should establish that a digital purchase carries enforceable access guarantees that survive the seller’s commercial decisions, including guarantees that bear on what can be transferred or bequeathed. Transparency obligations, requiring sellers to disclose how long content will remain available, are necessary but do not change the underlying conditions.

For gamers, a voluntary code of conduct does not bind new market entrants, does not provide individual legal remedies, and does not change the intellectual property architecture that the Commission itself identified as the barrier. If the Commission’s June 2026 response is the last word, the Stop Killing Games campaign will have achieved awareness and nothing more durable. The Commission, however, appears to forget that it is considering the need to review the Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market, and that the DFA also presents opportunities to uphold consumers’ rights. Identifying the problem should translate into finding a solution, if the Commission is serious about ‘Fairness’ in the DFA.

For libraries and memory institutions, the DFA should recognise that extending access guarantees to institutions serving public interest functions is a direct expression of its mandate, not a stretch of it. The copyright reform consultation, open until 25 June, provides a parallel route for the dimensions this instrument cannot reach. Both tracks matter, and both need to approach the problem as structural rather than sectoral.

What Our Memory Will Look Like

The gamer, the librarian, and the mum are not asking for much. They are asking for the commercial promise implicit in every transaction they entered into: that paying for something means something durable, and that a cultural life built over decades can outlast the platform that hosts it.

The European Parliament is examining digital ownership today, and the DFA will land on MEPs’ desks in the near future. What it is actually deciding is the shape of our collective memory in a digital age: whether individuals can trust that what they acquire persists beyond the seller’s goodwill and convenience, whether institutions can preserve what societies will need in fifty years, and whether the things we value enough to buy are things we are permitted to leave behind.

This is where the joke finds its punchline. When the gamer, the librarian and the mum walk out of that bar, the Digital Fairness Act should mean they are no longer empty-handed.

Written by Caroline De Cock, LL.M., Head of Research