Quote:
Originally Posted by Shaggy
That's absolute nonsense. First sale has nothing to do with content vs media. First sale says if you own something, you can sell it. You certainly do own a single copy of the content, it makes no difference if that copy is paper or digital.
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You're absolutely right that the doctrine of first sale has nothing to do with content vs. media. This is at least in part due to the fact that when the doctrine was first established there was no way to separate content from media so no one even considered the possibility. Content and media were inseparable and considered indistinguishable, what applied to one applied to the other.
One important point to note is that the doctrine therefore had and has nothing to do with copyright because no copies were involved and so copyright law didn't come in to play.
However, with the move to digital and separation of content from media, there was a renewed look at the doctrine which led to the shift to a licensing rather than a sale model. Licensing came in partly to sidestep first sale (you can sell the media but not the license to the data on it) and partly because copyright had entered the picture because now the end user could easily make copies.
This could lead to a situation (with sale rather than licensing) where a person could legally sell the movie they bought on DVD but not the DVD. (They buy the movie - so they own it and first sale applies). But then what happens to the physical DVD that they still own? It contains the movie they no longer "own" (after all, they sold the movie) but they still have it because they have the DVD it's on.
That sounds like giving lawyers a license to print money.
The problem is simple: First sale was created with the idea that content and media are inseparable; copyright comes from the idea that content has value in and of itself separately from any media.
It's a mess.