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Simple, you own the physical book and you can do whatever you want with that physical item. You are not allowed to reproduce that book for giveaway or sale. If you owned the contents of said book you would be legally allowed to reproduce the book in part or whole to sell or give away as you wished. Software is the same. You have never owned a game. Even way back in the stone ages you only owned the physical media. You could destroy the disk(s) or CD(s) or DVD(s) in any way you wanted or give it away or even sell that specific copy to someone else but you were not allowed to reproduce it for giveaway or sale. Ownership entails control over something to use it in any way you wish. That's why the sale of a piece of software was always a license to use the software even when the software was on a physical disk which was included in the sale and it has always worked fine.
What some companies have been trying to do is change licensing to the point that you no longer own the license but only rent the license despite having purchased a license. That is basically what Ubisoft is saying here. Ubisoft is trying to break an already agreed on contract. That is illegal. Ubisoft is also trying to change the terms of licensing from a purchase which is effectively perpetual to a purchase which is only for a limited time but without even specifying what the term length is. To my knowledge that is also illegal.
This is also why I brought up EULAs and such. Companies have been using EULAs and changes in them to change the terms of the original contract of purchased software. In only a technical sense is this legal because technically be agreeing to the new EULA you have agreed to a change in contract. However, this is a unilateral change with no input on the side of the consumer. Basically it's Darth Vader telling you he has altered the deal and to pray he doesn't alter it further. It's very unlikely this is legal or enforceable. This is especially so because open ended contracts that allow one party to change whatever they want at anytime aren't normally legal as that isn't really a contract.
This is why I personally don't have a problem with losing access to something like an MMO when it is shut down by the company. An MMO was designed from the ground up to be played only on the company's servers. It must be due to the type of interactions in the game. It's also in the terms of the contract with the company that once the company shuts down the servers, the consumer's use of the game ends. The server software and the client software are vastly different in MMOs. This isn't like an FPS which is simple enough for the client software to also work as a server. That said, if an MMO company wants to and can release the server software they should do it. It would be extremely interesting to see how many people actually manage to get it to work. It's also not possible for every MMO to do this. In the case of The Lord of the Rings Online, it's effectively impossible due to the licensing of the rights to use the Lord of the Rings IP.
