this contradiction always confused me. either way the official company is “losing a sale” and not getting the money, right?
There’s a few things about this
- Many times you don’t own the digital good, you subscribe to it. No I’m not joking, that’s why services can usually take it away at any time. You normally own “a licence to play it on a single PC” or similar.
- This isnt apples to oranges per se. Selling digital goods is fine, it’s copying it. Similar to how photocopying a book and selling it would not be okay.
- It’s important to note there is a narrative push by companies too. They spend lots of money putting videos on every DVD saying “downloading is stealing” because if society thinks piracy and stealing is the same, it helps them litigate and make more money.
- Your idea of a lost sale is a hard one, from a media company point of view, it’s about making money. So if you can make people believe “a download is a lost sale” or “sharing a digital file is a lot sale” etc, then you can use that to sue individuals, isps, sharing sites, search engines etc and make more and more money while also having more power over your product.
Because the book and disc guys couldn’t figure out a way to stop you back then.
Nowadays college books have one time codes for tests, and games will sometimes have codes included for inportant unlocks to force used purchasers to pay up.
One thing to keep in mind that may be relevant: copies of non-digital things are different than digital copies.
Digital (meant here as bit-for-bit) copies are effectively impossible with analog media. If I copy a book (the whole book, its layout, etc., and not just the linguistic content), it will ultimately look like a copy, and each successive copy from that copy will look worse. This is of course true with forms of tape media and a lot of others. But it isn’t true of digital media, where I could share a bit-for-bit copy of data that is absolutely identical to the original.
If it sounds like an infinite money glitch on the digital side, that’s because it is. The only catch is that people have to own equipment to interpret the bits. Realistically, any form of digital media is just a record of how to set the bits on their own hardware.
Crucially: if people could resell those perfect digital copies, then there would be no market for the company which created it originally. It all comes down to the fact that companies no longer have to worry about generational differences between copies, and as a result, they’re already using this “infinite money glitch” and just paying for distribution. That market goes away if people can resell digital copies, because they can also just make new copies on their own.
it will ultimately look like a copy, and each successive copy from that copy will look worse. This is of course true with forms of tape media and a lot of others. But it isn’t true of digital media, where I could share a bit-for-bit copy of data that is absolutely identical to the original.
There is one exception: reposted memes, they are losing pixels more and more. /s
What about physical media containing digital data, e.g. a CD?
Logically yes, downloading or a sharing a digital file is a “lost sale” - but as Aaron Swartz said - “lost sales” are also caused by Earthquakes, Libraries/DVD Rentals, Negative Yelp reviews, Market Competitors, and so on. Why just blame it on file sharing…
Because companies have money, and money makes laws.
Both require a license and that license is revocable in both cases. It’s pretty much impossible to enforce the legal use of physical media, so they don’t. Rather, they go after those making copies.
If you ever want to REALLY own your media, make sure it is physical.
Usually, when the question is “why is copyright restrictive in these evil and/or dumb ways” the safe bet is that the the answer is “Disney.”
The legalese in the US (which might as well be everywhere as you need to have compatible copyright with the US to have a trade deal with the US, and your country is in trouble if it doesn’t have a trade deal with the US) is basically that:
- If you buy a physical copy, you’ve become the owner of that one copy of the IP contained within. As the owner of that copy, you can do stuff with it like read it, display it, destroy it, or sell it on to someone else thanks to the First Sale Doctrine (but you can’t do other things like copying it, unless it’s a DVD as there’s a specific exemption for the copy your DVD has to make to RAM in order to decode the DVD). There’s nothing the copyright holder of the original can do to stop you exercising these rights.
- If you buy a digital ‘copy’, you’ve not bought a copy, you’ve bought a licence to use one of the publisher’s copies that they’ve given you permission to have on your device(s). They’ll also have given you permission to do things like read it if it’s an ebook or play it if it’s a video game, but as it’s their copy, not yours, you don’t automatically get rights to do anything they’ve not explicitly permitted you to, and it’s not in their interests to permit you to sell it on unless they think you’ll pay enough more for a resaleable copy that it covers a potential future lost sale.
I’m sure plenty of publishers would love for the second set of rules to apply to things like books, and from a quick googling, it seems like occasionally academic textbooks have included a licence agreement instead of you actually owning the physical book, but I imagine that most publishers are concerned about bad PR from attempting this with a hit novel and also don’t want to be accused of fraud for having their not-a-book-just-a-licence on the shelf next to regular books and thereby tricking consumers into thinking they were buying a regular book. EA attempted to double-dip over a decade ago with Battlefield 3, which included a copy of the game (with regular First Sale Doctrine rights) and a licence key for the online pass (which wasn’t transferrable) and got bad press because of it. Newer PC games often come as a key in a box with no disk or a disk that only runs a web installer, so you’ve not got a copy of the game to claim you’ve bought and obviously only have a licence, and this seems to have caused less upset. This wouldn’t work with a book, though, as you have to fill in the pages at the printing factory, and can’t magically do it only after the user’s got it home.
Just a small point on the first comment (and I wish I could find the article to refer to, but the internet is a giant void that buries things faster than a mudslide). There was a case where a game developer sued, and I believe won, against a homeowner who was selling one of their games at a garage sale because, even though they had the physical media, the EULA explicitly revoked transferral of possession and was, in fact, just a license, not ownership. I remember it vividly because it was the first time I had ever heard of someone claiming that someone did not own a physical object that they purchased in a store. Afterward, I discussed it with some of the used game retailers and found out that there were some games that they were specifically prohibited from accepting as trades for this very reason.
Because lawyers, accountants and MBAs making policy for things they don’t understand.
I believe selling and sharing ebooks is illegal too. So digital and physical contents is different
Y’all don’t really give a fuck about the actual musicians, do you.
In contrary. I do. But I fucking hate the whole useless, greedy industry that sits on the artists neck. I prefer p2p transactions so that the artists I like can keep producing more of their art.
