That's a new thing, a specific new thing defined by a license and is only synonymous to the concept of loaning a physical good, and only synonymous because the definition in the license intends to make it that way.
The fact is, lending requires scarcity. I would never in my life lend goods to a friend if I could provide an identical duplicate for basically zero cost. Why would I? I'm not bound by scarcity by choice.
Steam invents scarcity by limiting the number of "friends" to 10, and by enforcing a policy that will boot off friends ~five minutes after the owner logs in.
Real life doesn't need such machinations for the system of lending to work, which is why lending physical goods can never be the same thing as lending digital goods IMO.
It's not that new, or at least not significantly newer than the idea of intellectual property overall. Even before DRM ,most software had licenses defining how it could be used, how many computers it could be installed on and whether the license was transferable. Steam is simply doing the same thing but using technical measures to enforce the agreements.
