Vanishing Libraries: Technofeudalism and the Illusory Promise of Digital Ownership

When you buy a physical book, the words don’t change after you’ve read them. The cover doesn’t update to match a screen adaptation, and the seller cannot reach into your bookshelf and take it away. This stability comes from a legal framework that constructs ownership as a ‘bundle of rights,’ including the freedom to lend, resell, and preserve. Today, however, digital media is often licensed and not sold, leaving consumers with a revocable permission to use it instead of complete ownership. This reality became more apparent in 2020, when Ubisoft retired the servers for their video game “The Crew”, revoking access for every player. Nearly a decade earlier, Amazon’s remote deletion of George Orwell’s “1984” and “Animal Farm” from Kindles and unannounced edits to Roald Dahl’s texts, showed how effortlessly platforms could rescind or rewrite content that buyers once presumed they “owned” based on their experience with physical books. This, in turn, asserted the ultimate ownership that was always retained by the corporate licensor.

Yanis Varoufakis dubs this ‘technofeudalism,’ arguing that since the 2008 financial crisis, digital platforms and data have become the modern equivalent of land, with tech corporations acting as digital feudal lords. Aaron Perzanowski and Jason Schultz have argued in The End of Ownership that we are witnessing a deliberate shift away from property rights towards a restrictive licensing model that governs nearly every software-enabled device. This new order rests on two mechanisms: technological and legal. Technologically, Digital Rights Management (DRM) and server dependency create a system of “tethered property,” perpetually binding every digital file to its corporate source and making consumer possession inherently precarious, as access can be revoked remotely. Legally, the End-User License Agreement (EULA) legitimises this techno-feudal control by shifting the governing logic of functioning from property law to contract law. Perzanowski and Schultz argue this is a deliberate restructuring of power that dismantles the traditional bundle of rights, stripping away what Honoré identified as core incidents of ownership: the right to possess, alienate, and manage one’s property. This ‘unbundling’ is a political act that redefines the social relationship between producer and consumer, transforming it into a hierarchical relationship between a digital lord and a digital serf.

In the United States, the first-sale doctrine exhausts distribution rights for physical copies, allowing owners to resell or lend them. However, courts have declined to apply this principle to digital downloads. In Vernor v. Autodesk, the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit held that a click-through EULA transforms a purchase into a non-transferable license, a flawed test Perzanowski and Schultz critique as hinging on the licensor’s self-serving claims. Similarly, in Capitol Records v. ReDigi, the United States Supreme Court ruled that because digital transfers create a new ‘copy,’ they are ineligible for resale, thereby prohibiting secondary markets. The situation is only marginally different in Europe, where the UsedSoft decision carved out a limited right to resale for software, but not other media. India’s Supreme Court recently recognized digital exhaustion but included a caveat: it does not apply if a restrictive EULA is in place. Licensors can therefore bypass it through carefully worded contracts, and resale rights remain largely illusory.

The Socio-Legal stakes of this are immense. Consumer autonomy that flows from ownership (the freedom to use and tinker) is hollowed out by systems of corporate surveillance and control, where every digital asset can disappear at a provider’s whim. Secondary markets, which historically disciplined prices, extended the life of media, and democratized access now perish in the absence of resalable licenses, a breakdown of the balance that Joseph Liu identifies between owner control and public access. This threatens cultural preservation, as future generations lose the legal ability to archive or lend works that exist solely under revocable digital contracts. As Perzanowski and Schultz argue, widespread individual ownership helps guard against censorship and the loss of commercially unviable but culturally valuable works; a world of revocable licenses puts our shared heritage at risk.

The promise of digital ownership remains illusory. The right to buy a digital work dissolves into a conditional, revocable permission. We are then left not with libraries, but with leases. This model of perpetual rent is visible everywhere, from Adobe’s subscription-only Creative Cloud to automakers monetising heated seats as a service on hardware already sold. If preservation depends on permission, and access can dissolve at a whim, then the future of art, knowledge, and our collective imagination risks being privatised, redacted, and erased.