Non-ownership

The Id DM has a brilliant post up about non-ownership. What I found particularly interesting there was the implied slippery slope from owning physical goods to renting virtual goods to stealing virtual goods. If "ownership increases perceived value to us", and companies insist on only renting stuff to us instead of selling it to us, we perceive the value to be lower, and thus feel less guilty if we pirate the content. We perceive stealing a physical CD as being a crime, but downloading the same

World of Warkraft...