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Originally Posted by HarryT
You sell an iPod full of music. That music comes from one of two sources - either you've ripped it from CDs yourself (and are you going to give away all those original CDs with the iPod?) or you've bought it from iTunes (in which case you can freely re-download it).
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You can re-download it if it's available. If iTunes doesn't keep it available--or, in this case, if Diesel ebooks doesn't keep those books available--there's no reason not to allow transfer of ownership.
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It's the very ease of duplicating digital content that's the reason for the prohibition on re-selling it. Practically speaking, it has to be that way, because digital content can be endlessly replicated with no loss of quality from the original.
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Books and magazines didn't become illegal to resell when home scan/print/copy devices became cheap. The ease of copy-making has nothing to do with how legal it is to sell something.
And content producers--both artists and media/publishing companies--are going to have to deal with the reality of easy copies, and soon. It will *never* get harder to make copies. And saying "you can't share what you've bought" is attempting to stomp on how culture has always worked.
I'm not saying anyone should be free to make infinite copies and share them with the torrents. But we have to find some kind of middle ground; something between "digital copies = free for everyone as fast as they can download" and "one purchase = 1 user/reader/listener, ever."
How much reading would you have done, growing up, if you couldn't borrow books from a friend, couldn't buy any secondhand, couldn't receive a used one as a gift? How many of us would've learned to love books if the only ones we could read were either in libraries, or purchased new specifically for us?
Until digital economies face the cultural aspects of sharing, they'll continue to limp along and spend ridiculous effort fighting "copies" that are the digital version of the way people have always shared art and knowledge with each other.