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Apple and Amazon Flirt With a Market For Used Digital Items

Posted by Soulskill on from the authors-sharpening-their-pitchforks dept.

langelgjm writes "The New York Times reports that Apple and Amazon are attempting to patent methods of enabling the resale of digital items like e-books and MP3s. Establishing a large marketplace for people to buy and sell used digital items has the potential to benefit consumers enormously, but copyright holders aren't happy. Scott Turow, president of the Authors Guild, 'acknowledged it would be good for consumers — "until there were no more authors anymore."' But would the resale of digital items really be much different than the resale of physical items? Or is the problem that copyright holders just don't like resale?"

8 of 138 comments (clear)

  1. Resale? by KermodeBear · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Or is the problem that copyright holders just don't like resale?

    I don't think we need to look any further than this. Copyright holders have always hated the idea of resale of any kind; they think it loses them revenue.

    Maybe they're right, maybe they're wrong, I don't have any hard data in front of me. I can say that if I buy something and it's mine, then I should be able to do whatever I please with it.

    --
    Love sees no species.
    1. Re:Resale? by ganjadude · · Score: 5, Insightful

      how do you figure they stand to lose more revenue? for one, no overhead (or much less) to host a few meg/gig file than to have a warehouse of 1 million books. Secondly the secondary market has not hurt book authors to the extent that we no longer have authors, why would this be any different? These copyrights holders want to sell you "the right to view/read/listen to X" but they dont want to allow you to own X. that is the key issue at hand.

      --
      have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
    2. Re:Resale? by Nerdfest · · Score: 5, Insightful

      The part of this that's annoying to me is not the resale of digital goods part ... that should be assumed to be acceptable in the same way as any or goods are resold. The part I find annoying is that these weasels are patenting methods of doing it. I have a lot of trouble believing that anything they propose is original or not obvious.

    3. Re:Resale? by ohnocitizen · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Probably because used digital goods are more appealing than non digital used goods. If I buy a used book, pages may be torn, it might have writing inside "this is for Dave, thanks for being Dave", or it might have coffee stains. A used digital book has none of these problems. This is going to impact the market significantly. Why buy a new copy for $10 when I can buy an identical copy for $3?

      Unless of course they figure out a way to add the coffee stains digitally. THEN we're talking.

    4. Re:Resale? by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · · Score: 5, Insightful

      It's almost true for books. In 99% of the time, a book from a used book store or library functions identically to a brand new book. Maybe the spine has a crease, but that doesn't really affect your use of the book.

      Authors have survived for centuries with people redistributing used books. They will survive for centuries more with people redistributing used ebooks.

      I suspect that, for books, what really scares them(at least the ones that are actually thinking, and not just bitching about anything that stands between them and their dream of getting paid per-eyeball-per-second for everything the've ever touched) would be an efficient secondary market.

      Used books, barring serious abuse, retain condition well; but the market for them is physically segregated: New and used books are often sold through different channels(except textbooks, which usually hover right over their target population), in different stores, etc.

      So long as that is the case, the impact is blunted. If, say, Amazon were able to add a checkbox to the Kindle that allowed a user to 'sell' a book for half what they bought it for(probably in Amazon credit rather than cash) and then Amazon seamlessly and immediately offered that 'copy' for sale to the very next person who went to buy a copy(and, since they wouldn't have to pay the publisher anything, they could presumably offer a modest discount off 'new' and still make a much greater margin), then the publisher could be up shit creek.

  2. Hey Scott! by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Remember the tragic story of how centuries of people being able to freely sell/lend/whatever the fuck they want printed books exterminated all authors and creativity, leaving only a scarred wasteland, bereft of culture and picked clean by locusts?

    Oh, wait, neither do I. Because. It. Didn't. Fucking. Happen.

  3. Copyright is not compatible with digital content by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Copyright thrives on the idea of artificial scarcity. There is no scarcity on the internet.

    As people have been saying for quite some time (TechDirt comes to mind), the only way to make money off of digital content is to make the person want to pay you money even in the event you do not control access, distribution or resale of your works.

  4. With e-books by razorh · · Score: 5, Interesting

    How about they just sell them for a reasonable price (ie. not equal to or more than physical books) at which point there would be no need for reselling.