This is why I've bought almost all my music digitally for the past six years, yet have never "bought" a movie that wasn't on a disc or a book that wasn't made of dead trees.

For some reason, content providers became amenable last decade to letting people buy digital music without a leash attached to it, but still have yet to come to the same enlightenment on other media. I don't understand it.

When I was a kid Consumer Protection legislation actually existed. We can fix this and we should. I wonder whether any particular member of Congress is more amenable to this than others?

Yep, this is the future that we are buying into by supporting companies that offer nothing but DRM'd streams. While they are dishonestly marketing that stuff as "buying" media, in reality you're just indefinitely renting it, and could lose it at any time. This is why I recommend to never exchange money for individual titles like this - if you're going to pay for DRM'd streams, at least pay for something like Netflix that rents out its whole catalog for one (monthly) price.

The saddest thing about this whole ordear is that, generally speaking, you can't even genuinely buy digital video - as-in, you can't buy DRM-free downloads. The only way to actually own something is to either buy a physical copy and strip it of DRM or to pirate it, and that's a sad state of being. Digital media could be so much more, yet it's completely stuck under physical media. And you pretty much can't even disrupt this in any realistic manner, because the gatekeepers will never let you.

Me too. Technically you don't buy a copy of a movie from Amazon in this way, you're buying a conditional license to watch the movie. What you said is true. If you cannot resell your copy, you don't actually own it.