The Button Marked Buy

Sony recently reminded a lot of people that the movies they “bought” were never theirs. A licensing deal lapsed, and films customers had paid for and pressed a button marked “Buy” to acquire were slated to vanish from their libraries. The purchase was a rental all along, dressed in the word “buy.” And the internet answered with the slogan of the moment: if buying isn’t owning, then piracy isn’t theft.

I understand the anger, and I want to fix the slogan, because it is wrong in a way that hands the other side the win.

Take the second half first, “piracy isn’t theft,” because it gives the game away. Copyright infringement was never theft, and it was never piracy either. Both are metaphors, and both were picked by the people who profit from you swallowing them. Theft means someone ends up with less than he had. Copy a film and the studio still has everything it had a second ago; another copy just exists now. Jefferson said it best two centuries back: a man who lights his candle at mine takes my flame without darkening me. Copying is not taking. So when you shoot back “piracy isn’t theft,” notice that you still said “piracy.” You accepted their word and only begged for a lighter sentence. The frame was the whole fight, and you lost it the moment you agreed to argue inside it.

Now the bigger miss. The slogan treats copyright as property, so the only question left is whether copying it is stealing. But copyright is not property, not the way your house or your savings are. Read the Constitution. Congress may secure copyrights “to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times… the exclusive Right.” That is not a natural right the state discovered. It is a monopoly the public agrees to hand out, on purpose, for a while, to get more work made, and the deal has a back half everyone forgets: when the limited time runs out, the work belongs to everyone. Copyright was a bargain, temporary privilege now for a common inheritance later. The public was the senior partner.

And the public’s half has been looted. The first American copyright ran fourteen years, renewable once. Today it runs the author’s life plus seventy, and ninety-five years for a corporate work. Steamboat Willie only reached the public domain in 2024, which tells you what “limited” now means. Somewhere along the way the whole bundle got rebranded as “intellectual property,” three words built to make a temporary public grant sound like an eternal private right, so that questioning it feels like defending theft. That rebrand is the con. Once you believe copyright is property, every argument is over before it starts.

Which is how Sony gets to sell you a button marked “Buy” and deliver nothing. There is a rule called first sale, on the books since 1908: when you buy a copy, you own that copy, to lend or resell or keep on a shelf forever. It is the plain meaning of “buy,” and it is why a used bookstore is legal. Digital “purchases” were engineered to route around it. Call it a license, not a sale, and the copy is never yours; you are renting on terms they can revoke. That is the actual scandal, and the slogan can’t name it because it is still busy arguing about theft. The problem is not that copying might be okay. The problem is that buying is no longer owning.

Let me be clear about what I am not saying, because the slogan slides from a true grievance into a false permission. Sony breaking faith does not turn every download into justice, and I am not for abolishing copyright and leaving the songwriter and the small studio with nothing. A monopoly long enough to earn a living from your own work is the honest core of the thing. The enemy is not the fifteen-year copyright. It is the ninety-five-year corporate one, the license wearing the word “sale,” and the digital lock that outlives the company that sold it.

So here is the better slogan. Not “piracy isn’t theft,” which fights on their turf with their words. Say instead: buying is supposed to be owning. If it is a license, it may not be called a sale. What you buy, you own, to keep and lend and resell, and it does not evaporate when a server somewhere changes its mind. Bring copyright terms back down to something a public domain can survive. And stop letting anyone sell you the word “buy” and hand you a rental.

The people chanting that piracy isn’t theft have the grievance dead right and the language dead wrong. They are not pirates, it was never theft, and what they are actually angry about is that a bargain meant to serve them got rewritten until “buy” means nothing. I made the full case, the constitutional one, in a longer piece: It Was Never Property. The short version fits on a button. It should have said “Rent.”