Sony Says You Don't Own the Games You Bought. Crypto Says It Can Fix That

Sony’s contention in court that players don’t actually own the digital games they purchase has revived an old debate over the nature of digital ownership. Consumer-facing industries have for years shifted toward licensed access rather than transfer of property, producing high-profile incidents such as Amazon’s remote deletion of Kindle copies of Nineteen Eighty-Four in 2009 and other cases where digital films, TV shows or ebooks have been removed or altered after sale.

Critics and some creators argue the core problem is centralized control: when a platform records a sale as an internal database entry, the operator can revoke or change that entry without the legal protections that typically attach to physical property. Researchers note this dynamic applies across media—streaming music platforms have also reshaped consumption by prioritizing access over permanent libraries and by altering how artists are compensated.

Proponents of blockchain and Web3 technologies say those systems can address the ownership shortfall by giving users a verifiable, self-custodied title to a digital item. Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) were promoted as a way to provide a public, on-chain record that ties ownership to a specific digital good, whether a game item, song or movie. But the initial crypto-era implementations carried practical limitations: many NFTs still reference files hosted on centralized servers and include publicly readable metadata, meaning ownership of the token does not necessarily confer exclusive control of the underlying content.

To close that gap, technologists and startups are exploring privacy-preserving approaches. Encrypted NFTs, access controls, trusted execution environments (TEEs) and fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) are among the tools named by builders as ways to keep content private while maintaining on-chain ownership records. Early experiments using TEEs—some tied to projects by filmmakers such as Kevin Smith and Quentin Tarantino—appeared during the 2021–22 NFT boom but waned as the market cooled.

Industry voices stress that the remaining obstacles are largely about integration rather than impossible cryptography. Existing wallets, marketplaces and standards were designed around publicly readable metadata, and encrypted or permissioned NFTs introduce new requirements for key management, transfer rules and confidential computation. Until those ecosystem pieces adapt, encrypted NFTs are unlikely to deliver a seamless, widely adopted replacement for the centralized ownership models critics want to escape.