Nowhere do they use terms like "rent" or "lease". They explicitly use terms like "buy" and it's not until the fine print that the term license even comes up.

This! It really should be illegal to present something with the phrasing "buy" unless it is provided to you via a license that prevent it from being withdrawn. To "sell" cloud hosted media without having the licensing paperwork in place for it to be a sale is fraud.

Yeah, I understand that hearing the same simple explanation of "you don't own it..." gets to be annoying. Especially in places like this where most people are pretty well aware of the situation.

The primary issue seems to be that enough people support this type of service willingly for the sake of convenience and are generally ignorant to the potential long-term issues. It feels pretty exploitative as a consumer.

But I don't see how making the distinction between ownership of the content vs the license is providing legwork for those services. In my mind, that distinction is key for understanding that the service is not for me. And I may just be looking at this too optimistically, but I would hope the same would be true for users who don't read the fine print, or happen to have not understood the issue until something like this post is presented.

If people are aware, why do they keep buying movies they won't own?

Not the collective ownership of everything, just the collective ownership (and eventual abolition) of private property, which differs from personal property in that they are assets which are used for the purpose of capital accumulation (e.g factories, real estate, farms, supermarkets, etc.)

block chain

No. Never. Stop asking. Crypto is not a currency and blockchain is a solution in search of a problem.

Adding blockchain into the mix changes nothing. Whether your digital ownership is stored in their centralized database or a distributed database, they still have control over everything because they're the ones streaming it to you. They can just as well block your access & block resale.

The only way to actually digitally own something is to have a full DRM-free copy of it (ianal though this still might not be enough to allow resale).

Keep it in your hard drive and carry it with you, this was not a hard problem 20 years ago, but we're being conditioned to regression in expectations and functionality. Better than yet another blockchain overkill and works offline.

PS: just like the creeptobros say: "not in your disk, not your file." or something like that.