Quote:
Originally Posted by Ben Thornton
Why couldn't you have a digital model that was a kind of transferable license? That doesn't strike me as a laughable idea. It would be possible, for example, for Amazon to allow a Kindle book to be transferred to another user. I'm not promoting this as a great idea, but I would support it as something worth discussing. The point of the thread, I thought, was to ask the question as to whether there was a legitimate model or not.
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Sorry...you're right. I honestly didn't mean to be so dogmatic.
It's certainly worth discussing. I tend to come at it from an individual creator doing a one on one digital sale, but there are definitely other models/options that larger companies might have.
For instance, beyond reselling the kindle itself, for an Amazon-style setup, where they basically license, as I understand it, the use of the file for several different "readers" they might be able to do something creative. Say you want to upgrade your kindle, load your "stock" onto it, then sell the old one complete with "stock". There might be a way to then add a second account to that old Kindle for the new owner for new downloads, retaining access to the original "library" but no additional download rights. Or say you begin with the rights for 6 readers. You use it on your kindle and on your computer, then you "resell" your rights to the remaining 4 readers.
From the individual creator's point of view, the only product we can sell is the file itself, and applying a resale model onto a digital file is, to say the least, disconcerting. At CC, we've made that file DRM free with 11 different formats for the price of a single book. We give free upgrades if/when we improve the format of a product. We've tried to play as fair as possible with the consumer.
Theoretically, following this basic concept, someone could buy one download, copy it and resell it, to someone who also copies and resells it to someone else who copies and resells it... even if you don't copy it first, you're passing on something with an infinite lifespan. It's not, if you will, exhaustible. This could go on infinitely, all of them thinking they're involved in an ethical and legal transaction.
Ethically? We'd have sold one copy. $5.00 for two year's work, and that copy could be being resold for the next thousand years. Yeah. That sounds fair.
Legally? Heck, I'm no lawyer. If it is technically legal, I wouldn't be surprised to see the Exhaustion Doctrine as applied to digital product to be challenged in court if this becomes a common practice. The Exhaustion Doctrine was written before digital product was even conceived. If you read it, it was obviously designed to deal with items with a natural lifespan. Something that simply isn't applicable to digital product.
But most of all, the whole idea is self-defeating when applied to product purchased directly from the creator. In the old model, authors were theoretically "paid" for that book by their advance. Nevermind most authors get far less than a minimum wage for their labors, and as the market has gotten crazier and crazier, their chances of earning out and having anything remotely like a real income subsequent to that advance, something which in the past every author counted on, has gotten less and less.
Common E-book sales are a fraction of even the worst distribution NY came up with. The only factor off-setting that differential is the direct sale that allows the bulk of the money to go directly to the author. If you like an author's work and buy second hand, you're directly undermining the author's ability to write more. That, to me, is self-defeating.