In short, the people who "purchased" these cameras do not own them.
Specifically, the owners of these cameras may own the hardware, but cannot use it because they do not own nor control the software that runs it.
Richard Stallman predicted this decades ago. Regardless of what you think of him, he was the first person to come up with the idea of free open-source software expressly to give users the ability to (quoting) "control the program and what it does for them. When users don't control the program, we call it a 'nonfree' or 'proprietary' program. The nonfree program controls the users, and the developer controls the program."[a]
He was, and is, right about this.