The deeper shift is not just that ripping a DVD became easy.

It is that ownership itself was quietly replaced by conditional access.

In 1999, the law treated copying as the threat.

In 2026, the bigger issue is that users often no longer own the media, software, tools, or even access paths they rely on.

Hardware got cheap.

Software became free.

But control moved upward into platforms, licenses, subscriptions, DRM, accounts, and cloud identity.

The real question is not whether copying became easier.

It is whether ownership survived the transition.