I recently passed on some of my favorite books to a nephew. Probably nobody will break into his house and take the books off of his shelves when a license agreement expires. I'd like to be able to do the same with GTA 6 if it's good, but it looks like that would require hacking.

Discs can rot, but I would still take a large blu-ray collection over a large MKV collection stored digitally. The odds that your entire blu-ray collection will all rot are much lower than a catastrophic data loss.

And most people are not good enough sysadmins to keep a collection of digital files from being lost over decades. And even more so when the digital files are pirated, which makes them more or less fungible, they can be redownloaded so investing in backups is not a priority.

> Physical things (...) degrade over time

There are many books available older than any of the existing tech companies are likely to exist for. I'd bet those books will remain readable until that time as well, and there's nothing stopping people from making copies of them. Making such copies is in fact also completely legal in a lot of places.

Does having a hard drive full of mp4s count as holding it?

Given my memory these days, I can't keep that either.