The rank-and-file consumer wanted to believe that "purchasing" something was permanent, but the metaphor is leaky. If I purchase a table from Ikea, then I take the kit home, I assemble it, I store the table, I maintain the table, I clean the table, and I can keep the table around for as long as I can pay rent on the apartment or whever it's being housed.
The same goes for a CD or DVD: you can keep playing it as long as YOU store it, YOU clean it, and YOU have a machine that can decode and reproduce the content.
But with digital intangibles in the cloud, none of this holds true. Your "purchase" belongs to Chad and it's in Chad's garage:
So how can you be sore when Chad tires of the sweet deal you cooked up?
The same type of leaky metaphor happens with "piracy-as-theft". You copied some content and stole it! No it's not stolen: stealing is depriving a rightful owner of property. The rightful owner (or copyright holder) can calculate all their lost revenue and try to hold you accountable for that, but with piracy and copying, nobody's deprived of the content itself. Some cultures accept copying and plagiarism as a great honor and compliment to the original authors...