Quote:
Originally Posted by starrigger
Let me guess how people here would react if they tried that. 
I suspect this will all follow the music model eventually. But I don't think you'll ever see them explicitly allowing resale when resale effectively means "selling a clone." Do you see the music industry saying, "Sure, you can resell these MP3s when you're done with them"? |
The most obvious, legal resale is "I'm selling my laptop loaded with books, music & games; I don't have another copy of all that content." People ask all the time if they can resell their Kindle or Sony with ebooks on it, and the "official" answer is "no," even though those ebooks may not exist in other places.
Sometimes, they exist in the store library--in which case, Amazon or Sony should be willing to transfer or remove access to them on request.
The fact that it's *easy* to make copies of digital content doesn't change the way the laws work. It's been possible for quite a while to buy a book & photocopy it and then sell the original, or buy an album, tape it, and sell the vinyl, or buy a CD, copy it, and return the original for store credit. (Many stores don't allow returns for this reason.)
It's possible that the laws should change--but that doesn't mean "content sellers should start acting like those laws already exist." If they want digital content to be treated differently from the way other sales are treated, they need to lobby to change those laws.