Sony says that the game you bought doesn't really belong to you, and cryptocurrency says it solves this problem.

Sony recently argued in court that players do not actually own the content after purchasing digital games. This statement will once again bring into public view the long-running debate around digital ownership and reveal a deeper problem with current patterns of consumption of digital content: Digital assets paid for by users, outside the protective framework of traditional property laws, can effectively be reclaimed or modified at any time by platforms.

What you buy doesn't belong to your mother.

In an interview with Decrypt, Mysten Labs co-founder and chief cryptographer Kostas Chalkias said that the battle is still in its early stages.

The problem is not limited to the gaming industry. As far back as 2009, Amazon Kindle users were surprised to find that their purchased George Orwell 1984 e-books had been remotely deleted due to a copyright dispute. Since then, Amazon has continued to adjust the content of ebooks, and works by authors such as Roald Dahl, Agatha Christie, and R.L. Stine have all been published with remote editing.

The same is true in the field of film and television. Users are gradually realizing that what they have bought for their content is only a license that can be revoked, many films have disappeared from digital libraries quietly.

Streaming music platforms have been described by Canoe founder Jess Zhang as a way to replace ownership with unlimited access, completely redefining the way people consume music. Users are losing out on the possibility of creating permanent libraries for their music. Industry executive Sammy Andrews further notes that this has had a knock-on effect on creators' relationships with listeners: whether it is loyal fans or casual passersby who pay the same royalty, the system rewards traffic shares rather than depth of emotional connection.

The problem is centralized mediation.

Although many directors, including Christopher Nolan and Gilmour del Toro, have advocated a return to physical media, there are those who argue that the root of the digital ownership dilemma lies in centralized intermediaries.

Primavera De Filippi, Research Director at CERSA explains: "When you buy a digital asset from the platform, the platform always has ultimate control over that asset and your ownership of it is just a record in its database which can be revoked at any time".

She also added that since the protections against arbitrary expropriation in traditional property laws do not apply to digital assets, crypto platform operators can take away their properties with a single line of code without giving any legal reasons and even modify the content of these digital assets without users' knowledge or consent.

Is Blockchain the Solution? New Trials for Crypto NFTs

In other industries where consumers have long complained about centralization, decentralized technologies such as blockchain are often held in high regard. Zhang told Decrypt: "Blockchains and Web3 provide a clear path for consumers to actually own copies of digital goods - whether it's a game or a song or a movie".

NFT was initially touted as an all-in-one solution. Tim Sun, a senior researcher at Hashkey, said that NFT allows digital objects to have publicly verifiable records held directly by users. But he reminded that excessive gossip and speculation during the NFT boom had damaged its public image.

The technical architecture of early NFTs also had its own limitations. De Filippi noted that "if the NFT is aimed at hosting files on company servers, then there remains a reliance on platform operators".

Another pain point is that the NFT metadata on most blockchains are public, and anyone can right-click to save them. Guy Itzhaki, CEO of privacy blockchain Fhenix stated in an interview with Decrypt: "The core issue here is that owning a NFT does not equate to exclusive control over the assets behind it". If one NFT represents access to a piece of artwork, a game prop or private content, publicly available metadatha exposes its contents or properties to everyone.

He argues that what users really need is the ability to both own NFTs and control who can see behind them, an access-control capability that would bring the NFT closer to a physical object's model of ownership. Before this, NFT holders had repeatedly argued that true ownership lies in possession of credentials and content, sometimes including intellectual property, while skeptics easily countered that copying a $16,000 cube image was as easy as blowing it away.

Itzhaki explains that there are several ways for NFTs to be privatized, including traditional encryption and trusted execution environments (TEE) as well as full-homogeneous cryptography (FHE). In fact, TEE-based crypto-NFTs were sold during the 2021-2022 NFT boom, which included projects involving filmmakers Kevin Smith and Quentin Tarantino.

The bottleneck for cryptographic NFTs lies in the integration rather than the technology itself, Itzhaki said. Existing wallets and trading markets are built around open metadata, whereas crypto-NFTs pose entirely new requirements in terms of permissions, key management, transfer and confidential computation while also being tied to specific infrastructures. This works well when it comes to validating technical feasibility but makes it more difficult to integrate into the broader NFT ecosystem.

As privacy technology gains more attention in the blockchain space, he said that such capabilities will be integrated deeper into wallets, markets and developer tools. When these capabilities are adopted more widely, they will naturally extend to the NFT arena as well, while a clear standard for privacy-based NFTs will accelerate the industry's transition towards real-world use cases with value, ultimately enabling true ownership of digital assets.

At this stage, there are no missing links in technology, Zhang concluded. What is lacking is the cultural atmosphere and trust foundation to drive mainstream adoption. She added that NFTs provide a clear pathway for digital ownership as well as intellectual property distribution and licensing on the Internet, while blockchain represents a technological solution for creating a new world where digital ownerships are clearly defined and become truly possible.