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Slashdot Asks: Should It Be Legal To Resell E-Books, Software, and Other Digital Goods? (arstechnica.co.uk)
There's no one stopping you from selling the CDs and DVDs that you buy, so why can't you do the same with e-books, music albums, movies, and other things you've downloaded? Ars Technica reports about a Dutch second-hand e-book platform called Tom Kabinet which has been "at a war" with Dutch Publishers Association (NUV) over this issue. This is seen as a threat to the entire book industry. German courts have suggested that the practice of reselling e-books should be stopped, whereas Dutch courts don't necessarily see it as an issue. What's your view on this?
"so why can't you do the same with e-books, music albums, movies, and other things you've downloaded?" Umm...what a ridiculous question. It's because these goods can be replicated. Why can't the person just buy them from the source, rather than being "used" (in either case, the property would be in the exact same condition anyway.)
How do you prove you no longer have an eBook? If I buy one and then sell it to someone else on eBay, I'm probably just selling them a copy of my eBook, not my actual copy. What is to stop me from selling my eBook hundreds of times over? There'd need to be some sort of licensing/registration in place where if you sell your copy, you need to transfer the license or copy to the other party. Sounds a lot like DRM.
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
For me, it would be fine for it to be illegal, if they gave you a generous discount over the printed version. I mean they could tell you this book is $10 in the paper book form, part of which has to cover printing/distribution etc, and this book you will own completely and can do as you please with including selling or lending. Then, the same book is $2 in e-book form, but you don't actually outright own it, so you can't sell it.
Something like that would be fine with me. As it is now, they tell you the e-book is also $10, but at the same time try to restrict what you can do with it.
Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. Polar Scope Align for iOS
That's exactly the catch. Yes, I think it should be legal to sell your copy. No, you shouldn't be able to sell A copy while keeping the original.
If DRM prevents copying things, it makes them more like physical objects, and that means the providers shouldn't be able to prevent resale of items, because the argument that "you can't prove you no longer have it" becomes moot - it was DRM'd, right? If the ownership transfers, you no longer have access.
If the item is not DRM'd, the argument above becomes somewhat valid and preventing resale would make sense.
You can use it as a chance to make consumers happy and incentivize not doing DRM.
It's not the fall that kills you. It's the sudden stop at the end. -Douglas Adams
A physical book can age 50 years without wear. That digital book's technology will be gone is 10 years and dead in 50. If something is unfair to publisher, it's how little consumers are willing to pay for a physical book. The digital version version has the same content without all that printing cost.
All that extra profit is a boon to them. I don't think there's enough digital resales to negate that.
ID: the nose did not occur naturally, how would we wear glasses otherwise? (apologies to Voltaire)
Renting e-books...like many libraries do now at no cost to the reader?
Do libraries hurt writers?
You assume a copy was kept. Stop assuming that. Not everyone is a pirate. If I give a physical book to someone I am not keeping a photocopy of it. When I give a game away I delete the copy that I have. Sure, pirates might not do this but pirates are not slowed down by DRM. And the content creator may not even mind, it's the content publishers who have gone off the deep end here and restricting legal rights to customers who have fully purchased items from them (not rented).
Except we aren't talking about theft here. We're talking about the resale of something that should be treated as property. It really is a double standard you're pushing there because an individual end user license is no more less of a fiction than an actual copyright. If you can't own one, then you shouldn't be able to own the other.
The idea of being able to own and transfer partial rights to something is actually terribly mundane outside of the area of entertainment products.
I should be able to transfer the ownership of my iTunes copy of Age of Ultron just as easily as I can transfer ownership of the physical copy.
Of course this triggers an interesting engineering problem but it doesn't nullify the basic idea of personal property.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
And the ECJ ruling in UsedSoft vs. Oracle specifically declared that reasoning invalid, by saying that if it quacks like a sale, and walks like a sale, and acts like a sale instead of renting it out... then it's a sale and the first sale doctrine applies.
A license that requires payment of a one-time fee is a sale. And the ECJ specifically mentioned that the language in the license can be disregarded in that case.
Therefore, by the (faulty) logic you're using, you're just a cow with a keyboard - osu-neko (2604)
Assigning costs ... to the free and total dissemination of information
How about assigning costs to the creation of the information?
How about assigning costs to the editing?
How about assigning costs to the creation of artwork in the books?
Each of these activities has costs, but whether the expenditure creates value is a different question. I can hire someone to move rocks from one side of my yard to the other, and then back again, incurring cost, with no value created whatsoever.
I have great affinity and sympathy for those who work to create works of technology (such as myself) or artistic works such as literature (my spouse and other relatives), but the mathematical reality is that information itself, if infinitely and cheaply reproducible and transportable, is without intrinsic financial value, and can only be effectively sold for non-trivial prices when artificially controlled by regulation.
I continue to be fascinated at this tug of war between one the one side the financial interests of creators and historically profitable distributors who no longer add any value, and on the other side the benefit to society of having easy, cheap access to information, each of which has value. In the end, there's no "right and wrong" here other than that which is agreed upon via government and other forms of negotiation.
And before "stealing" gets tossed out there, if you still have the thing which was "stolen", it wasn't stolen. It was copied. There's a difference. The argument about lost profits has more basis, but has been grossly exaggerated in many cases, and only exists due to the aforementioned agreements, not due to any inherent physical reality.
WALSTIB!
Agreed. However, what about the situation of the "license"? People pay less for digital copies of media without understanding that they weren't buying a property right, only a usage right. Kinda like a refundable versus non-refundable airline ticket.
But it doesn't even start to until the one who originally held it has started to deteriorate himself...
I mean, just to give everyone and idea what kind of bullshit we're dealing with here (i.e. "death + 70 years"), if Paul McCartney died TODAY, along with Ringo Starr, "Love me do", released 1962, would enter public domain in 2087 (because copyright expires at the end of the year, not the day it happens).
One hundred and twenty five years after it was created.
To put this into perspective, that would basically mean that you can sensibly expect something written around 1890 to enter PD today. If you're into ballet, you're in luck, The sleeping beauty is from that year. Though... I'm not so sure if you get that past Disney, after all their version isn't old enough to enter PD already.
Or ever.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.