"Film" is "recorded once" (not really, but that gets into the editing side of things and is too in the weeds) but re-releases have been a thing for as long as there have been films. A couple years back I read a REALLY interesting (scholarly) article discussion how a lot of the early black and white movies were edited due to World War 1 and 2 and the politics surrounding that. In some cases by the theatre themselves, which led to unique versions.

I already referenced game of thrones which was 100% about "the experience". Much like Lost and How I Met Your Mother before it, a bad ending largely soured the entire fanbase on the show. Which is why it was so interesting to go from "This is the greatest tv show ever made" to "fuck this garbage" literally within a week. If you weren't watching it at the time (piracy or subscribed), you will never experience that. Same with How I Met Your Mother where "Robots vs Wrestlers" led to a lot of people realizing how the show would end and it recontextualizing all the flash forwards... to the actual ending where now everyone was angry and hated Ted more than we hate Ross. That was more like a year (two? I forget just how troubled the last season was) but it was fascinating to watch all the diehard fans realize that The Mother was going to die (and our hearts breaking for Ted when he gives that speech about wanting a few more months with her) to being immensely angry that The Mother died... in large part because Cristin Milioti managed to live up to all the hype and we grew to love her just as much as Ted did.

Which... is theatre. We forget it, but the Shakespeare that we read in high school was actually about contemporary events of the early 1600s. So much of media is a product of its time (even most books). "Historically", this was "handled" through new releases. Maybe you first watched it as a VHS. Then you bought the DVD five years later and suddenly decided that Revenge of the Sith was actually a good movie. Then you bought the blu-ray another ten years later and question your own intelligence. And, if I hadn't picked a Disney movie as my example, you would buy the Criterion Collection in a few years and have a new experience with it. And you would be "okay" with that because you are getting different extras or visual quality and so forth.

So that is why I don't think the "lease" model precludes paying for content. Buying the VHS of Ep1 doesn't mean you own the UHD of it (damn, that is what I could have used to avoid needing to Criterion this tortured metaphor).

Where this DOES break down is with the online services either shuttering or losing the rights to stuff (see Sony and Discovery). But... even that is kind of comparable to the media formats. Who actually still owns a working VCR (that doesn't watch OAN all day...)? And, even though I can just as easily watch a DVD as a UHD, I am generally going to re-purchase "physical" media because watching upscaled 480i is not my idea of a good time and I would rather it be based off of the original film than whatever DLSS feels like doing.

Which all gets back to making things better. Rather than just say "I can't play my VHS on my playstation so I am morally righteous to pirate everything", we need to have these discussions as a society. Because the 1080p copy of Powers Season 1 that I have on my sony account is probably never going to get any better, but it is still an ongoing resource drain for Sony. And the old model of "upscale it or release new BTS footage" doesn't make a lot of sense... as we move all BTS footage to youtube anyway.

As for ethics: Lemmy is a horrible venue for it. But I will still assert that anyone whose ethical outcome is "it is good for me to pirate anything I want" that doesn't also include "because nothing I create is my own" (which actually negates this entire argument to begin with...), at best, has a low amount of ethical maturity. And those people would benefit from actually studying the various philosophies to better themselves.