The first sale doctrine as it applies (or doesn't apply) to digital goods comes up a lot on a law and technology podcast that I listen to, particularly in respect to
ReDigi, a service that was trying to facilitate the resale of digital music files. ReDigi's approach was that the original owner would lose access to the digital media after reselling it, although I have no idea how anyone could enforce such a provision given that one could burn audio files (DRM'd or not) to a CD and rip them back in an unprotected format prior to selling the originals. ReDigi has not fared so well in the courts in the US. I am not a lawyer but the digital music and ebook licensing models seem like they would occupy a virtually identical legal space, so the ReDigi precedents would probably be held to apply to eBooks, and would be rather unhelpful to consumer ownership thereof.
A good writeup of a few recent court cases regarding the first sale doctrine, including ReDigi and the resale of digital media, is at
Ohio State's library blog. One interesting factoid mentioned there is that Amazon has a patent for a digital resale market, which suggests that Amazon thinks it's okay to resell pieces of one's digital library as long as they get a cut of the proceeds ...
Still, it's been years since I bought an actual book or a CD -- who has room to store all that physical stuff???
