Here’s something that catches almost everyone off guard. When you hit ‘buy’ on a movie in your PlayStation store, or purchase an album on iTunes, or grab a game on Steam — you’re not actually buying it the way you’d buy a DVD or a vinyl record. You’re buying a license. A personal, non-transferable permission slip that says you’re allowed to use that thing.
And when you die, that permission typically expires.
The FTC has pointed this out directly: with digital products, what you get depends heavily on the platform’s rules. Your access might only last as long as your account is active — or as long as that company stays in business. That’s a very different deal than owning a physical thing.
Apple has historically spelled this out in their service agreement. According to a Loyola University Chicago analysis, you typically haven’t bought a license to the actual music or film — you’ve only bought a license to listen or watch. And under most platforms’ terms, that license does not transfer when you die.
So in most cases, your family can’t inherit your Steam library. Your kids can’t legally take over your iTunes collection. Your little sibling can’t claim your Nintendo games. The Funeral Consumers Alliance puts it plainly: the downloaded music or books are not your property. The terms of the service agreement control what happens when you’re gone — and most of those agreements say the license ends with you. (Laws around digital inheritance are still evolving and vary by state, so the rules may shift over time.)
This is genuinely weird when you think about it. You might spend thousands of dollars over your lifetime building out a digital library, and it’s legally closer to a long-term rental than an actual purchase. Physical stuff — a box of DVDs, a shelf of CDs, a stack of game cartridges — you can leave to whoever you want. Digital stuff, in most cases, you can’t.
The word ‘buy’ is doing a lot of misleading work here. It triggers the part of your brain that associates purchases with ownership, but the fine print tells a different story. This isn’t about one platform being sneaky — it’s pretty much industry-wide.
None of this means you should stop buying digital content. But it’s worth knowing what you’re actually paying for. And if you’ve got a growing digital collection, it might be worth mentioning to your family — or thinking about what a future digital estate plan even looks like, because it’s a newer area that most people haven’t figured out yet.