RWAToday covers the tokenized asset economy as it exists today — but we also track the industries where real-world asset infrastructure is most needed, most overdue, and most likely to transform. This article is part of that series. The technology described here is not hypothetical. The question is how quickly the industry recognizes the opportunity.
You have spent years building a digital library. Your Netflix watchlist. Your Spotify playlist library. Your Steam game collection — 200 games, some of which haven't been made available for purchase in years. Your Kindle library — perhaps hundreds of books, some out of print in physical form. Your Apple Music downloads. Your Adobe Creative Cloud subscription with twenty years of projects stored in the cloud.
When you die, your children will inherit none of it.
This is not an oversight in the law. It is the intended design of every major digital content platform currently operating. You do not own digital content on streaming and download platforms. You license it. And licenses, in almost every case, are non-transferable and non-heritable.
What You Actually Own When You "Buy" a Digital Movie
When you purchase a film on Apple TV, Amazon Prime Video, or Vudu, you are purchasing a non-exclusive, non-transferable license to access that film under the terms and conditions of the platform. You do not own the film. You do not own a copy of the film. You own the right to access the film for as long as: (a) the platform decides to continue making it available, (b) the platform retains the licensing rights from the content owner, and (c) your account remains in good standing under the platform's terms of service.
In 2013, customers who had purchased films through Microsoft's Zune and Xbox Video stores received notice that their purchased content would become inaccessible when Microsoft shut down those services. The company offered no refunds — only credits toward purchases on its successor platform. In 2019, customers of WalMart's Vudu discovered that content purchased through a partnership with Ultraviolet had disappeared when Ultraviolet's digital locker service shut down. These were not isolated incidents. They are the expected behavior of a license that is contingent on a platform's continued operation and willingness to honor prior commitments.
The Inheritance Problem in Practice
US estate law allows physical property — books, vinyl records, film prints, physical game cartridges — to be inherited by a deceased person's heirs without restriction. The same law does not apply to digital licenses. Apple's terms of service explicitly state that accounts are non-transferable and that "any rights to your Apple ID or Content within your Account terminate upon your death." Amazon's Kindle terms similarly state that digital content is licensed rather than sold and that the license cannot be transferred to any other person.
Several states have passed laws addressing digital asset inheritance — Delaware, Rhode Island, Virginia, and others have enacted versions of the Revised Uniform Fiduciary Access to Digital Assets Act (RUFADAA), which gives executors some access to digital accounts. But access to read the content of an account is different from the right to continue using or to transfer the licenses within it. An executor can read your emails. They cannot transfer your Kindle library to your daughter.
The Physical World Comparison
The contrast with physical media is stark. A vinyl record collection has cultural and financial value that is fully inheritable. First-edition books are estate assets. A physical film print of a rare movie is property. Physical game cartridges for discontinued consoles appreciate in value and are actively traded on secondary markets.
The physical versions of the same content that exists in digital form can be resold, given away, lent indefinitely, and inherited across generations. The same content in digital form provides none of these rights. The shift from physical to digital media — driven by convenience, cost, and platform design — has been a systematic reduction in ownership rights that most consumers made without understanding the trade-off.
What Blockchain-Based Digital Ownership Looks Like
A blockchain-based digital asset is structurally different from a licensed digital file in one fundamental way: it is owned rather than licensed. A non-fungible token (NFT) representing ownership of a digital film is a property right that exists on the blockchain, independently of any platform. If the platform that sold it shuts down, the token still exists. If the original company is acquired, the token still exists. If the owner dies, the token can be transferred to heirs as part of an estate, exactly like a physical book or a vinyl record.
Several projects have explored blockchain-based media ownership. Ujo Music pioneered musician-direct releases where fans could purchase ownership of music files. Catalog launched as a marketplace for blockchain-based music ownership. The emerging category of "digital goods with true ownership" is distinct from the NFT art bubble of 2021 — it is an application of the same token structure to media that people actually consume: books, films, games, music.
The regulatory and infrastructure question is what happens when "you own this on-chain" needs to interact with "you need this platform to play it." The playback layer and the ownership layer are currently bundled together on streaming platforms. Separating them — creating a world where you own the content token and multiple competing platforms compete to provide playback services — is the architectural shift that would make digital ownership meaningful rather than theoretical.
Your Netflix library is worth something to you while you are alive. The day you die, it disappears. The physical books on your shelf still have your children's names written inside them. The infrastructure for digital assets that can be inherited, resold, and transferred is the same infrastructure being built for tokenized Treasuries and tokenized real estate. It is a question of when the media industry decides to use it.
→ Airline Miles — the same license-not-ownership problem at $48 billion scale
→ What Is Tokenization? — the infrastructure behind true digital ownership