Standfirst
A farmer who cannot repair his own tractor. A driver asked to pay every month for heated seats already installed in the car. Customers discovering that television shows they purchased have disappeared from their digital libraries.
These incidents seem unrelated.
Together, they reveal a deeper shift: ownership and control are beginning to separate, and the companies selling products increasingly intend to keep one of them.
In late 2023, thousands of PlayStation users received an unexpected email. Television shows they had purchased from Discovery through Sony would soon disappear from their digital libraries because a licensing agreement had expired.
The reaction was immediate: “How can something I bought simply vanish?”
Sony later reached a new licensing agreement and restored access. Yet the incident exposed something much larger than a dispute over digital rights. It challenged an assumption so deeply embedded in everyday life that most people had never stopped to question it: when you buy something, doesn’t it become yours?
At almost the same time, American farmers were still fighting for the practical right to repair tractors they legally owned without relying entirely on manufacturer-controlled software. BMW faced criticism after experimenting with subscriptions for features customers believed they had already purchased with the car. HP printer owners complained that firmware updates left some third-party ink cartridges unusable.
Different industries. Different products. The same structural signal.
For centuries, buying something followed one of the simplest agreements in economic life. Money changed hands. The seller walked away. The buyer assumed control. If the television broke, you decided who repaired it. If the car needed modifications, you made them. If you wanted to sell it ten years later, nobody needed permission.
Ownership was never just a legal concept. It transferred authority. The object belonged to you in every practical sense because the manufacturer no longer had meaningful influence over it. That understanding survived the Industrial Revolution, mass production and globalisation because physical products naturally enforced it.
Software has begun to separate ownership from control. The change arrived without dramatic headlines or sweeping legislation. It spread one product at a time until the pattern became impossible to ignore.
The Sale That Never Ends
For most of commercial history, companies faced the same economic reality. Every sale ended the relationship. Once a customer walked out of the shop, the manufacturer had almost no influence over what happened next. The only reliable way to earn more money was to persuade that customer to return for another purchase.
Software created an entirely different business model. Buying Adobe Photoshop or Microsoft Office once meant purchasing a copy that remained on your computer until you chose to replace it. Adobe’s transition from Creative Suite to Creative Cloud changed that relationship completely. Customers no longer bought a finished product every few years. They entered an ongoing commercial relationship that delivered updates, cloud storage and new capabilities through recurring subscriptions.
Everyone focused on what customers gained.
Almost nobody noticed what companies had gained.
The sale no longer had an ending.
That insight became one of the defining business innovations of the digital era. Companies no longer had to wait for customers to come back. They could continue improving products after the sale, remain connected to customers for years and build predictable recurring revenue instead of depending on one-time purchases.
When Software Escaped the Screen
The software industry proved the model, and every other industry noticed.
Music moved from shelves of CDs to streaming platforms, and films and television soon followed. Consumers embraced the trade because the convenience was undeniable. Access to millions of songs and thousands of films became more valuable than building personal collections.
The important change was not streaming itself. It was the business model behind it. Once companies realised they could remain connected to products after the sale, the same economic logic spread into tractors, cars, printers, televisions, doorbells and household appliances. One industry after another, products people had always thought of as mechanical became software-defined.
John Deere became one of the clearest examples.
A modern tractor is still an extraordinary machine, but it is also a sophisticated computer running proprietary software that controls diagnostics, calibration and many repair functions. Farmers argued that spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on equipment should also include the practical freedom to repair and maintain it without depending exclusively on authorised dealers.
The dispute was never really about tractors.
It was about ownership.
Once software determines how a physical product functions, ownership becomes something more complicated than possessing the hardware. Connected cars receive new capabilities years after leaving the factory. Smart televisions evolve through operating-system updates instead of hardware upgrades. Increasingly, the object sitting in your home is only one part of the product. The other part lives in software, cloud services and user accounts that remain under the manufacturer’s control.
The hardware changes hands. Part of the product does not.
The Business Model Hidden Inside the Product
It is tempting to see these episodes as isolated corporate decisions: a licensing dispute at Sony, a repair battle involving John Deere, BMW’s subscription experiment or HP’s firmware controversy. Viewed individually, they seem unrelated. Viewed together, they reveal a fundamental change in the relationship between buyers and sellers.
For most of the last century, manufacturers competed to make the next sale. Once a product left the factory, owners decided how long to keep it, where to repair it, when to upgrade it and whether to sell it to someone else. Companies could build the product, market the product and support the product, but they could not continue exercising meaningful influence over it once ownership had changed hands.
Software changed that equation completely.
For the first time, manufacturers could improve products long after they had been sold. Security flaws could be patched overnight. New features could appear years after purchase. A smartphone bought three years ago might be more capable today than it was on the day it left the box. Consumers gained real value from that shift, which explains why it happened with so little resistance.
The benefits did not flow equally. Consumers gained convenience. Companies gained continuity.
The relationship no longer ended at the checkout counter. It continued for as long as the software, cloud services and user accounts remained active. What had once been a completed transaction gradually became an ongoing commercial relationship.
Why Right to Repair Matters
This is why the Right to Repair movement has spread far beyond independent mechanics and technology enthusiasts.
At first glance, it appears to be a debate about spare parts, repair manuals and diagnostic software. In reality, it asks a much older question.
What does it actually mean to own something?
For generations, the answer seemed obvious. Buying a product meant deciding what happened next. You chose who repaired it, how long you kept it, whether you modified it and when you sold it.
Today, that answer is becoming less straightforward.
Replacing a damaged component may require software authentication. A repaired device may refuse to function until proprietary software recognises the replacement. Increasingly, repairing the hardware is only part of the job. The software has to accept the repair before the product fully works again.
That is why governments are debating repair rights, interoperability and digital competition with growing urgency. These debates are not really about tractors, printers or smartphones. They are attempts to define ownership in an economy where software has become inseparable from the physical products people buy.
The Next Stage
Until now, software has largely extended the life of products after they were sold. Artificial intelligence moves even more of a product’s value beyond the product itself.
Tomorrow’s camera may rely on cloud-based AI for its most advanced editing features. Vehicles are steadily becoming software platforms that improve through remote updates, while household devices increasingly depend on AI services running in distant data centres rather than entirely inside the hardware sitting in your home.
The device may belong to you. Its most valuable capabilities increasingly may not.
As more value moves into software and cloud infrastructure, products become platforms, platforms become services, and services become ecosystems that continue evolving long after the original purchase.
The New Meaning of Ownership
The biggest economic shifts rarely arrive as revolutions. They emerge as small changes that seem perfectly reasonable on their own. A subscription replaces a purchase. A firmware update improves a product. A cloud service unlocks new features. An AI model delivers capabilities no device could provide on its own.
Each step feels like progress. Taken together, they are creating a different kind of ownership.
For most of modern history, ownership answered a simple question: Who is in control? Buying a product transferred possession and authority at the same moment. The manufacturer built it. The customer governed it.
That arrangement is beginning to change.
The software economy has created what might best be described as conditional ownership. You possess the object, but part of its value remains connected to software, cloud infrastructure and licences that never actually become yours. Your rights increasingly depend on terms that can be updated, services that can be withdrawn and software that someone else continues to control.
None of this happened because companies set out to abolish ownership. They pursued recurring revenue, stronger customer relationships and products that improve over time. Consumers benefited from those changes as well.
But every structural shift has unintended consequences. Here, the old contract between buyer and seller has been rewritten. Buying something no longer always transfers complete authority over it.
That is the pattern linking Sony’s disappearing television shows, John Deere’s repair battles, BMW’s subscription experiment and the global Right to Repair movement. They are not isolated controversies. They are early signals that the meaning of ownership is changing.
The Industrial Revolution changed how products were made. The internet changed how they were distributed. The software economy is changing what ownership means after the sale.
Future generations may not look back on this period as the moment subscriptions became normal or AI became mainstream.
They may remember it as the moment ownership stopped being absolute and became conditional.
