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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?
But with it likely comes harsh(er) DRM that means total end to end tracking.
How about a blockchain for books?
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It should be illegal to resell these things because it should be illegal to sell them in the first place. Such things are nothing but human thought, there is nothing tangible here, nothing that can break or be replaced or fail. Information by its very nature is infinitely reproducible, that is what makes it so valuable to the human race and is the reason we have achieved dominance over the planet. Assigning costs, prices, or artificially erecting barriers to the free and total dissemination of information in any/all forms should be the crime here, not the other way around.
"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.)
Why shouldn't it be legal?
I bought it, I used it, I am selling it because I am no longer using it.
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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.
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Books deteriorate, digital files do not. There is already a de-facto limit on how much a physical good can be re-sold. Lifting that limit by allowing digital resales changes the status quo, and is unfair to publishers. However, an outright ban on reselling goods would also change the status quo. There should be a happy medium.
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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.
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I really wanted to say yes, but there are a lot of issues with this concept. It benefits the readers but hurts society at large, (undermining ownership rights, lowering the number of copies floating around for non-owners to discover, use).
The used market is predicated on depreciation preventing people from competing with the original sellers. You buy X brand new for $Y, use it up some, then sell it for $Y - z.
Without depreciation, what you are doing is more similar to renting a book, rather than buying and reselling it. You get full use of it, but it is returned in practically the same state, with only time being gone.
Renting e-books would be a BAD idea - it would hurt the writers tremendously and the general population would no longer own the books, which would leave the population open to giving up ownership rights, something that has high value for society, but low values for the individuals as a whole.
A better question would be to clarify ownership after Death. I bought ebooks, and both they and my account should be inheritable after death.
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This is sort of like asking a tree full of squirrels if they think plastic domes should be banned from bird feeders.
We've been coming here rattling our cranky fists about this for the past 18 years or so (about digital rights, not bird feeders).
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.
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If selling copies were legal, it would make it impossible to sell copies of digital goods, as there's always be someone willing to sell for cheaper and the race to the bottom would make everything free.
Not if people actually sold the digital goods, meaning, they didn't keep a copy of their own, and they only sold it once. Then it's quite like any other used item sale. (It's not exactly alike, of course.)
Now if you're going to counter that people wouldn't do a legal resale as I specified above, I'll counter that by saying a law against resale won't stop those people either.
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.
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Copyright exists to address the free rider problem. If you wish to do away with copyright you need to come up with an alternative for dealing with the free rider problem.
No it doesn't. Copyright exists for only one reason: to create an environment where people will create more content. It's all about the benefit to society, not about the creator "getting what he deserves". Whatever definition of copyright creates the "best" society is the optimum definition. More liberal copyright rules promote wider use of material, but more restrictive rule promote more creation of material. A balance must be struck, but there are no sacred cows. If it turns out the best balance exists when all books can be copied without any payment to anyone, then so be it... not that I think that's the right model. I'm nearly certain that a balanced copyright system would allow a lot of free riders and still promote plenty of content creation. Michelangelo was funded by the Medici family (among others), even though there was no copyright law to compel them to pay him.
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.
For a digitial material what is the difference between renting and owning? You rent the book, read it. Now you have read it. Now consider instead buying a book. Ideally this costs more than renting it. Now you have read it. It's not like you are going to put a digital book on a bookshelf. You could sell it but that's a hassle. Indeed the cost of renting it ought to be about the same as buying it minus what you could re-sell it for. SO really in an ideal world renting is what you really want for a digital book.
The real problem here is two fold. First, things are not ideal. the price of a digital book these days isn't a lot less than the paper version. Amazon says I own it but I can't resell it or read it on something not on a kindle so I don't really have possession of it. I have basically leased it.
If I really owned it I could re-sell it.
A virtue of digital materials is that they don't degrade and their market is global not local like most physical objects. Thus their may be a very large lifespan limiting the total sales of the book to a smaller number than if the book was physical or otherwise not transferable. It's not correct to say that if they charged less for the book that one would sell more as there are a finite number of readers for any given book
The trouble with that is that it potentially means book prices will rise for books that are re-sellable. A lot of people would therefore prefer to rent a book than own it in a transferable sense, if renting cost less.
Thus I'm all for a model where books are rented.
The problem here is we have neither. We have purchases of expensive digital books that cannot be re-sold.
As for the force of law enforcing this I don't see a problem. That's not the core of the problem.
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