I read through the court statement, but am things might be open for different interpretations.
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Originally Posted by HarryT
I see a number of potentially serious issues with this:
1. A used ebook market would destroy the "new" market, because there's no degradation of digital products, unlike physical ones. Many people would prefer to buy new paperbooks to used; there would be no reason to prefer a new ebook to a used one: the two would be indistinguishable.
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The judge seems to refer to the UsedSoft case in this context, ownership of a property (real or digital) or licence cannot be limited by a contract and can thus be resold. The claimants used the 'degradation of physical media' argument but that seems to be dismissed as irrelevant in the legal context.
In my opinion, the is a difference in availability of the new vs used ebooks. A publisher could sell an infinite number of an ebook -- in the used market here can never be more books for sale than the publisher has sold.
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2. How could it be ensured that the seller had deleted the book? What would be to stop someone buying an ebook, selling it, but keeping a copy for themselves?
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The reselling site asks the original owner of the ebook to promise to delete the ebook. According to the court statement that sufficient to fulfill their legal obligation.
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3. DRM. DRM is not transferable. There's no mechanism for transferring either an ePub or a Kindle book from one owner to another.
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To my surprise, DRM was not mentioned by the claimants at any point during the case. According to someone I talked with, stripping DRM is allowed in the Netherlands and this judgement would allow the resale of an ebook also after the DRM has been stripped by the original purchaser.