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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?
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
How old are you? Are you too young to remember public libraries? Have you never been to a used book store, a used record store, a used game store, a used movie store? Now when the same good is sold digitally, at the *same* price as the physical copy, the same rules should apply as long as you don't keep a copy. This used to be the copyright rules in the US. Technically it still is except that there are criminal laws against figuring out how to remove the DRM in order to give the original item to someone else. Pirates however have no hurdles whatsoever, this DRM exists only to prevent legal owners from legally reselling or giving away products that they own.
because for property, it's always been your right to sell it once you no longer wanted it.
If ebooks are property, then why should they be treated differently?
I can buy an album, never play it, and sell it in pristine condition later.
I can buy a book, read it once, and sell it basically pristine condition later.
It would be different if I was renting the ebook for a comparably lower price ($1 for a read, $13 to 'own' a transferable license).
And really, what should be sold is the right to read or listen to a book or song and as with any other property you should be able to sell that right or pass it to your heirs.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
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)
The obvious answer to this problem is to provide easy, inexpensive access to the content that people want. It's possible to make money through quantity when the cost to reproduce something is negligible.
If it cost $0.10 for the CD, plus $0.15 for shipping, plus $4 for design/print/publish... I would expect the CD to cost over $4 just for that small portion of profit that goes to the artist.
With digital distribution, there's no "shipping", no "printing", and no physical media to account for. Make the e-book some set fraction of the paper price. Hardback is $50? PDF is 10 (or less). I don't think any artist or author would complain about "What do you mean my stuff was bought by 3 million people?" instead of "10,000 copies sold!"
The only rationale I can see for keeping e-book prices equivalent to paper is to either keep printing presses operational, or (more likely) to milk as much money from the consumer as they think they can get away with.
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!