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Comment by sbarre | Hacker News Reader

What about digital movies? Or eBooks? Can you resell those after you've watched them?

Not arguing for either side here, just saying digital goods can be a bit more complicated than you're making them out to be.

First sale doctrine made sense when part of the cost of an item was the physical product itself, but with digital products, there's a near-zero production/distribution cost, so you're really only paying for the right to consume the media (book, movie, game, music, etc)

So in that case, what exactly are you reselling at that point?

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I think there was a recent decision by the ECJ saying that eBooks were not resellable, but I'm not sure about the details

> So in that case, what exactly are you reselling at that point?

Yes. Reselling is actually equivalent to a refund from the authors' perspective. Problem is that people are too often reselling to buy their next thing rather than because they are dissatisfied with the product. On the other hand, refund policies based on arbitrary rules are not satisfying, too.

I’ve been able to buy a book, read it, then sell it to pay for the next one... well, forever. Why is this a problem?

It may not seem like a problem for you, but every time you do that, someone else gets to consume the creator's work without the creator getting paid, which reduces the incentive to create.

In the long run, the problem may be less books to read because less people will write them.

It is of course possible to look at this only from one side, but that approach - from either side - is not sustainable.

One possible solution would be for the copyright owner to have the right to "tax" such transactions.

For example, every time a game is resold, the developer gets 10% of the resale value.

But, again, this is how property has worked for a long time. (Since its invention?) It’s been sustainable for thousands of years. Why is it not sustainable now?

There are in fact, more books now than ever before, using this resale model that we've always used. It has been and will be sustainable.

Interesting question. You actually can't resell digital movies in France because you can't buy a digital movie per se.

The common digital platforms operate on a 24h or 48h rental basis. You actually don't own the movie. You pay to view it once, you could view it multiple times within that timeframe, then it's gone.

Doesn't iTunes with its movie purchasing features exist in France?

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