So you see nothing wrong with the developers not getting anything from second hand sales? Imagine you've developed a piece of software and instead of making the millions you were dreaming of you only have a handful of sales because the people that buy your product resell it when they're done with it. Yes, it's an extreme example, but the principle is the same.
Please read the rest of this thread. I outline my beliefs, and my motivations quite clearly. You seem to believe that because your argument is invalid, it invalidates your point. What I said was this particular argument, made from either side of the debate, is asinine. It's like arguing that VCRs should be outlawed, because it will kill the home video market. It's like arguing that the introduction of the geometro would kill the truck market, because it was so much more fuel efficient. That which is demonstrably a logical fallacy can be aegis nor spear for either side of a debate.
No actually, Mr. Passive-Aggressive, my purpose of posting the first sale doctrine, which has been a centuries old development in copyright law, is to highlight the erosion of our consumer rights in the context of services like Steam, iTunes, etc. which try to abdicate their responsibility in giving consumers ownership over property and all of the legal rights endowed therein.
Now, you accurately point out the first sale doctrine does not apply to licensing agreement. But that is the entire point!
The first sale doctrine should always be mentioned when talking about whether rights holders are due a royalty on subsequent sales IP because it is the traditional legal precedent governing the resale of said IP. This legal precedent exists for good reason. Furthermore, the resale of IP only makes sense in the context of ownership, not in the transfer of a licensing agreement.
The whole point of this discussion is the intentional conflation of the rights bestowed by ownership, most prominently includes the right of resale, and the rights granted to the licensee by a rights holder, which was never intended to cover resale because the centuries-old legal definition of a license was designed to cover a temporary relationship and not, effectively, perpetual ownership.
It has only been in the last few decades, mostly through the Supreme Court case mentioned in your quote, that through the use of DRM and online downloads IP rights holders have gotten away from being held accountable to the first sale doctrine and other consumer rights regarding property ownership by defining the consumer's ownership through a license, which has incredibly weak protections.
Therefore, any further discussions on royalties due on subsequent sales of IP represents an even further erosion of the first sale doctrine, which I take serious issue with because it further pushes society (and, by extension, legal precedent) down the path from the traditional protections of ownership into the rentership society wherein consumers rights are subject to the legal whims of rights holders.
But I thought a little critical reading skills applied to the latter two paragraphs which you yourself quoted might make the legal ramifications of this problem self-evident. Silly me.
Not passive aggressive, actively citing why this debate exists in the first place. You typed one sentence. There is no reading between the lines, no nuance, and no reason in that argument. Your response, while slightly embittered by what was likely a more blunt than necessary response from me, is what I wanted. That shows that we have something to discuss, for which there is actual value.
I fully agree that ownership has been either stolen or voluntarily relinquished in the modern age. The reason that such things have been forfeit is that our society at large has moved from manufacturing to that of a service industry. As a service industry relies upon people demanding services, we have changed our perception of what can be offered as a service. The unfortunate truth is that our legal system has done nothing to keep up with the changing societal views on what is and is not a service.
So, I need you to answer me a few questions.
1) Assuming that software is a good, rather than IP providing a service, where does it reside? Is it on your computer, the Steam authentication servers, the developer's network, or perhaps even the download servers for Steam? I find it impossible to answer this question personally. Any answer has a dozen different counters, and we could spend all day arguing it out.
2) Assuming that you sell a piece of software to someone else, what legal recourse do they retain if the software does not work? Right now things like the lemon law protect consumers from being sold damaged goods, but no such protections exist in the case of software. Even the developers aren't culpable if you are sold software that doesn't work via a third party.
3) In the case of a third party being involved with the sale of the supposed goods, who retains the responsibility to the consumers after sale? If your software damages a million dollar piece of hardware, due to bad coding, who do you seek reparations from. In the case of something like a car the manufacturer is responsible, yet with software you'd need to perpetually support a product. It is beyond the scope of the legal system to force a manufacturer to support software indefinitely, yet because it doesn't degrade that is exactly the relationship that digital goods would have to bear.
4) How do we prevent duplication? With manufactured goods you have a physical item, yet with digital goods copies can be made forever. Who is trusted to make sure that only one paid copy of a good exist? Who can be trusted to do such a thing, when there's no incentive to offer that service without an associated price tag.
The witty, and useless, answer is that if you don't want to accept the license terms don't. Steam is a service you can voluntarily ignore, and there are almost always ways to get a hard copy of games. The issue is that even ownership of the disc doesn't entitle you to resale with PC games. What I proposed earlier was that publishers and Steam both get a cut of resale value, because they continue to accept responsibility for their customers (something that even physical goods aren't subject to unless warrantied, and even then only if you're the original owner). If they accept any money then they damn well better provide service. What you are proposing is we follow the rules we used to for physical goods. I can say that something as expensive, and as long lasting, as a car deserves different considerations than software. If the electronic nature of the items isn't enough of a reason, then I have to ask what software is currently on your computer? Is it the same as 10 years ago? Will it be the same in 10 years? What about damage due to usage. Sure, the HDD will fail, but once you've loaded up your backup does it perform any worse?
This debate is largely being settled case by case, and will likely take another decade to resolve. According to the makers of video games archiving abandonware is piracy. Emulators for anything more modern than an NES are tools for stealing IP, and digital goods only have value when the player forks over cash (after which every item becomes valueless for the purposes of being able to shut down servers at will). What I propose is that our digital goods retain value, because the publishers accept our money. The service rendered by platforms like Steam should be treated as such. You pay money, you get the service, and the publisher and seller agree to support you because they are being paid.
Nobody wants to fork over more money than they have to for a good or service. At the same time, we expect to receive the value of anything we pay for. I'd be willing to pay a modest portion of my trade-in value back to the publishers and Steam if I knew the game was going to be going strong months after release. I can't say that our current system, designed for physical goods, could address that sort of long term support.
That's double dipping and they can't have it both ways. Well, not forever anyway, as we're finally starting to see.![[XC] Oj101](https://tpucdn.com/forums/data/avatars/l/102/102321.jpg?1384764976){kind=avatar}
