If they call it a “sale” rather than a “licensing” then I consider myself entitled to remove the DRM (which I do to all my Kindle ebooks, for example) or to download a cracked copy for archiving (which I do to some games I wish to keep, if I haven’t bought them on GOG or another DRM-free platform). Common sense and ethics dictate that I am in my right to do this.

If companies are relying on a technicality - an obscure one to the general public, even though techies have been aware of this issue for over a decade - to hoodwink people and charge actual-purchase prices for mere licensing, then I am relying on the implicit tenets of morality, good faith and common sense to bypass their malicious and bad faith distortions. Artificial scarcity be fucked, I paid what they claim is a fair price for what they claim is the purchase of a digital good, so I shall treat it with Animus Domini just as I do with any physical purchase. This includes lending to others as per the First Sale doctrine.

The fact that the seller consciously chose to contradict themselves, calling it a purchase out in the open and a licensing deal in the fine print, should it ever work to someone’s disadvantage, should obviously be to the disadvantage of the person who intentionally made the blunder, not to good faith third parties. This is a well-established principle of legal ethics and Civil Law which is adopted by legal scholars the world over. Whether or not they have failed to apply it to these specific cases is wholly irrelevant to its validity, and I apply it to my own dealings with a perfectly clear conscience.

I legally purchase all my media, and I will use any and all means necessary to protect my good faith acquisitions, including those which are incontroversially illegal for those who have not purchased that piece of media, such as downloading cracked software, because this is simply done to remedy an inexcusable omission on the part of those who claim to have sold me a copy of that software but don’t provide me with the possibility to archive my copy locally. So long as these transactions are referred to openly as purchases, sales, etc. I shall continue to act in this way to enforce their overt nature over the malicious mischaracterization contained in their licensing.

In other words, slimeballs, have the guts to call it licensing and renting. Until you do, I and many like me will continue to make your lies come true and there is realistically nothing you can do to stop us.

The only person who actually owns IP is the person selling it

Technically, yes. If you paid for and downloaded an MP3 file. You own that copy so long as you maintain it like making sure hard drives, flashdrives, whatever don’t die on you. You can’t fully bank on the longevity of some services to maintain libraries sometimes and whether or not they’ll still honor some things if we’re 10 - 20 years from now.

As far as buying things off things like Steam? Technically, no.

I do own the games I bought from GOG, not the ones I licenced from Steam.