Like I don’t understand why this even became a thing and who even thought of it?
In: Economics
If you really “owned” it then it would be legal for you to make and sell copies of it all by yourself. The company that sold it to you obviously doesn’t want that, so by legal definition if you’re forbidden from doing certain stuff with it then you don’t “own” it
Because you can’t. Define “own the software”. What does that mean? Windows is literally yours? You can have all the code they used to make it? You can give it out to other people for nothing because it’s yours? You can stop other people having it too, because it’s yours?
The concept of owning software doesn’t particularly translate to the physical world because it’s not a physical thing. You have a license to use it on your computer.
Wow. I lived through this transition and, although people make good points here, there is only one right answer: Piracy.
Adobe & other media creation software are a great example. Avid and Final Cut (previous industry standard video editing software) came with crazy levels of copy protection; physical dongles in fact. Adobe (might have been Final Cut, but I think it was Adobe) had the Creative Suite and it was the first to just have a standard license key…..and everyone pirated it. Now, with a subscription based service, you can share that info all you want, but you are limited to 2 active computers per license (standard license) so there is no benefit it sharing it with others.
This was the primary reason cited by all major software companies when the shift happened. It’s also fiscal, as they keep you paying a lot longer, but piracy was the catalyst.
Ownership of a creative work is complicated. If you own a photograph, that means you own the copyright for the photograph. You can display the photograph as you wish, duplicate it, sell copies or licenses to use of it, use it in commercial works like a TV show, or modify it as you please.
To use software, you don’t need to be the legal owner of the software. You don’t need to be able to sell copies of it, for example, and the publisher of the software would strongly prefer you don’t. They’re the people who want to sell it, after all. So rather than sell you the ownership of their software they grant you a license to use it, which doesn’t give you all the rights that the ownership they keep would.
Legally, there’s a difference between the thing, and what you buy.
Take movies for example. When you buy physical media, you don’t own the movie. You have bought a perpetual transferable license to play that film. The film is still owned by the rights holders.
Code is the same way. All the intellectual property is still owned by someone else.
The legal history behind this is a bit complicated, but the simple version is that it has to do with intellectual property law.
See, because there’s (usually) nothing stopping you from just copying software that you have on your hard drive and sending it to everyone you know, companies that want to protect their copyrights, trademarks, or patents on their software can’t just relinquish full ownership of the software to you. Due to legal precedent, this has resulted in a legal situation where the software vendor has to give you explicit permission to use the software via a license. As a tradeoff, the company is required to assume liability and offer warranties unless they explicitly disclaim them as part of the license terms. In the past (like early 80s at the latest) this wasn’t the case because software wasn’t covered by copyrights, but the law has changed considerably since then.
*EDIT:* I should note for the sake of completeness that none of this applies to software that’s been released into the public domain in the United States. Some jurisdictions hold that the public domain doesn’t exist for complicated philosophical reasons, though, so even in the case of public domain software it’s generally advised to include some kind of license like the [Unlicense](https://unlicense.org) or [CC0](https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) for safety’s sake.
You don’t own it because nobody sold it to you. When you paid money, you only paid money for a license. the vendor didn’t think it was a good idea to sell you the program, and the past 40 years of legal cases have proven that to be a good choice on their part.
It’s like any digital good, unless you can make working copies without some sort of vendor validation, you don’t really own even the binary version.
> who even thought of it
Feudal lords in 500 AD began this time-honored tradition of owning everything and allowing you the privilege of paying to use it
Because the legal owners didn’t sell their ownership of it to you. What they sold you was a *license* to use their software in a limited way. Think of it like leasing out your or renting out your house: while another takes possession of your car or house, you still retain full legal ownership of it; you merely give them the right to use it in accordance with certain terms for a certain amount of time you guys agreed upon.
They could have drawn up the contract to transfer ownership of it to you, but then it probably would cost a lot more. Think about Spiderman. Who owns Spiderman? Sony does. But they sell you the rights to see the movie in the form of a movie ticket (or rental on a video streaming platform). They’re not selling you the rights to Spiderman (which if you had means you can sell and distribute it and you now own the copyright), but a license to see it a certain amount of times under a certain set of circumstances. But if you want to buy Spiderman outright, that can probably be arranged too, but it’ll cost a lot more than a $12 movie ticket.
So you see there’s a fundamental difference between owning something, and being given license to use it, and the law recognizes this difference. It’s the difference between lending / leasing and selling, between renting and buying.
> Like I don’t understand why this even became a thing and who even thought of it?
It started witht the concept of “intellectual property,” which was born when we realized we were coming up with works and inventions of the mind, of the intellect—works of art, music, ideas, code, software—which we realized needed to be just as real legally and worth protecting as physical property like a car or house.
Digital works are nothing more than a string of 1s and 0s if you think about it. And yet the law prohibits you from reproducing or sometimes even using certain combinations of 1s and 0s—why? Beacause those 1s and 0s are not independent of but rather are inseperably linked to something sacred and protected, intellectual property that belongs to someone.
If you were a photographer, artist, writer, musician, or software developer you would feel this: your ideas and effort end up as 1s and 0s which unless protected, anyone is free to copy or rip off or misuse. But the law protects you: if you only want to sell someone the right to use the software you produced in a limited way, and not do whatever they want with it, the law protects you.
Simply put….
You didn’t develop the software; therefore, you can’t own it. You only pay for the right to use it.
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