Content you purchased. Their wording. Not content you rented, not license you paid for.
They are effectively stealing the content you purchased.
(shamelessly copied from the top comment on /r/piracy on this very subject)
Digital license has lower quality video and audio
You cannot re-sell your digital license
You have a non-zero chance that your license will get revoked
I'm stealing that (no pun intended).
How many individuals have actually had their lives ruined, outside a very small number of people like Alexandra Elbakyan? Plenty of companies have been shutdown over the matter and plenty of scene groups have been raided but ever since Aaron Swartz prosecutors in the US seem to have little appetite for such cases and Europe has always been lenient as far as criminal penalties go. The latest scene group raids that made it to HN's front page ended in 60 day suspended sentences for the offenders which is a complete joke as far as penalties go. Nonviolent offenses that are barely worth prosecuting in most jurisdictions if not for media industry handwringing.
People in general aren't great at dealing with low-probability high-impact events. I think we're also not so great at dealing with legal and economic issues where the effect on most people is tiny but a small number are either affected extremely negatively (by losing these cases) or extremely positively (becoming tremendously wealthy as copyright holders).
People treat infringement with more of a Robin Hood mentality than normal stealing since you're copying rather than taking, and because big Intellectual Property Owners all happen to be tax cheats who all do fraudulent accounting to claim their profits all come from their Irish subsidiary yet feel entitled to government enforced monopolies on intellectual property.
You generally get sympathy if you're poor and infringing or being infringed, and don't if you're rich.
For a good — and centuries-old — example, a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leasehold_estate is something that's "owned"... but only for a certain number of years.
Saved [0], for whatever it's worth.
Clearly there are restrictions to what you can do with it (duplication, public performance, and so forth), but those restrictions are defined by copyright law. The notable exception is software, but it could be argued that licenses were a product of the need to duplicate software (e.g. install it to a hard drive). That said, modern software licenses do go far beyond that.
Then again, I may be misinterpreting the meaning of license. I have always views them as modifications to the rights granted by copyright law.
Buying a physical CD or an action figure of some copyrighted character follows that same principle, the wishes of the original publisher becomes irrelevant until copyright applies. So you can for example take family photos of your kid holding that Barbie without issue, even make copies of it and back it up to the cloud with no problem.
TLDR; To say a license exists implies some additional privilege, but that’s simply not the case here.
>> "The first sale doctrine, codified at 17 U.S.C. § 109, provides that an individual who knowingly purchases a copy of a copyrighted work from the copyright holder receives the right to sell, display or otherwise dispose of that particular copy, notwithstanding the interests of the copyright owner. The right to distribute ends, however, once the owner has sold that particular copy. See 17 U.S.C. § 109(a) & (c). Since the first sale doctrine never protects a defendant who makes unauthorized reproductions of a copyrighted work, the first sale doctrine cannot be a successful defense in cases that allege infringing reproduction."
Which is precisely why the courts tend to view misleadingly offering something for sale in the advertisement, and then adding contradictory conditions to that sale in the fine print, as just defrauding their customers. This blame the consumer mentality is impractical, unworkable, and legally wrong.