Quote:
Originally Posted by Crowl
Each time that used book is resold rather than somebody buying a new copy it is a loss of a sale though, even more than the spurious logic of one download = 1 lost sale that is commonly used by the music, film, book etc. industries.
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No, it's not a loss of a sale. Period. It's a COMPONENT OF THE ORIGINAL SALE. This is a fundamental aspect of retail markets that has existed as long as the very idea of bartering has been on the mind of mankind.
Where did you get indoctrinated with this nonsense idea? Whoever sold that book to the used book store, or sold it directly to the next owner has taken in cash as part of their personal economy which will and is retroactively a participant in their will and capability to further buy new books or other used books themselves.
Believing the lie that first sale doctrine is somehow theft is a blatant misunderstanding of the most basic type of economy. But, more likely, is the result of a long hard battle fought by huge industries built around benefiting from guilt-tripping people into wasting their money buying a new copy when it's unnecessary and inefficient to the consumers themselves.
And besides, if publishers really thought they could make even the slightest legal claim on the "lost sale" myth associated with resales, they could simply set the terms of the copy to be non-transferrable. It's not as though transferability is somehow limited to digitally rendered information. When you purchase a book you're purchasing a right to that copy. When you sell a book you're selling the right that you bought. You can do this because you never agreed to any artificial limitation on your right to first sale.
Seriously, I'm very tired of hearing this propaganda rhetoric about lost sales from the used market. Either the original buyer would have been less likely to make the original purchase, or the secondhand buyer would have been significantly less likely to make a purchase of the same item at all if secondhand sales could not be involved in that micro-economy.
Don't be a sucker for the IP industrial complex and their greed. Just because books don't lose much if any value from being read doesn't magically make them exempt from the standard function of retail economy.