When you purchase a book from a bookstore your rights to that particular stack of paper are pretty intuitive. … Those intuitions about ownership fall apart when we talk about our digital things. … That’s because your rights to those digital things are filtered through a maze of intellectual property law and limited by the fine print that you agree to when you buy them.
Using contracts to make an end-run around property law predates the web.
You may own your car but the software required to drive it is more like a song you listen to while driving, it’s only licensed to you.
By proxy, the companies creating these products are deciding what we are and are not allowed to do.
Source: Terms of service agreements are destroying the concept of ownership for digital goods — Quartz