Yes, my perspective on the status quo is largely American where there's enough regulatory capture by powerful corporate lobbies to assume that you can't trust consumer protections generally. American law also has a sad tendency to keep legislation, especially for things like consumer protections, as narrow as possible "to avoid Government overreach" and there is a wild pendulum in American politics between corporate interests and consumer protections.

In the US most laws seem to believe "if it is digital it is something new" which is creating so many "exciting" startup opportunities of "X but as an app" that get to skirt around previous regulations (until and unless someone writes new regulations). (It's not a "case law" problem, it's a "regulations/legislated laws are intentionally too narrow" problem. Because several political parties in the US have made that their mission to make sure laws are as narrow as possible.)

I get the joke that by definition that makes the US "uncivilized", but given how many of these companies that control major swathes of "digital goods" are American in posture, and how large the US generally is as a first world super-power, calling it "uncivilized" isn't particularly funny and maybe a bit dangerous if we are trying to defend consumer rights.

I appreciate that Germany is doing much better than US, and that there are other EU members doing similarly. I lament that it will take a larger international effort to push such protections into the radar of some of the American companies, and I especially lament the missed opportunity to do so in the GDPR itself given that was a scary enough regulation that a lot of American companies jumped to correct things in their TOS/cookie handling/etc even if they didn't believe they had any EU customers.

«Regarding things like VOD or that-like services: Well, you never bought anything there! You're usually only renting this stuff.

Apple got for example sued because they had a "buy" button on movies in Apple TV+ even though you can't "buy" of course any movies on Apple TV+—you can only rent them. Rented stuff doesn't belong to you in the end, so it doesn't get inherited by your heirs.»

That's not a distinction that US law has made to date. The en-US version of Apple TV+ still says "Buy" everywhere.

Additionally, there actually are analog "entitlements" law equivalents to "digital entitlements" and US does have a lot of regulations on the books for the analog equivalents (in Securities and Exchange laws). If I built a movie theater and decided to bond/notarize a ticket that stated the bearer would have access to a specific film any time that movie played and they wished to see it. Such an "entitlement" ticket you could resell or inherit. Beyond that being a somewhat silly business model in the physical world (depending presumably on how much you make on concessions from repeat customers, I suppose), it's often not done simply because there are so many Securities trading regulations today around it.

(But there are real world physical things that still exist even with such strong regulations in existence. It's not far from how mortgages work, for instance.)

Generally an entitlement/Security/Bond is still considered "bought" not "rented", even though it may be contingent on services provided/businesses meeting contractual obligations.

VOD can be considered a bought entitlement/"security" and could be inheritable. I'd argue that's how "common sense" in the US already sees it (and they don't yet realize that things like VOD entitlements are "personal to you and only you" rather than "bearer entitlements, based on how TOS are written today), but it is going to take a while for US regulations to catch up with that, if it ever does. But I can also understand the perspective of simplifying the entitlement/"security" and just calling it a "Lifetime Rental" and suing the the providers for truth in advertising.

But first all of this is going to get even more complicated and ugly because NFTs are fighting the same regulations fight (from a consumer protection standpoint: stupidly, because NFTs don't want regulations and especially don't want consumer protection/securities trading protection).