How does consumer ownership of digital media work?

Question

I am trying to physically backup all of my media and couldn’t find any of the videos I BOUGHT from Google Play. Best I can tell is this is done on purpose to force me to use Google Play. That got me wondering. Do I own the videos or just access to them? If Google suddenly went under, do they owe me my movies? What’s the deal, friends?

In: Economics

Answer 1

Google licenses the videos from the copyright owners and you license them from Google. You don’t own them in the same way that you don’t own the music on a CD. You own the disc and the plastic but not the content.