[antoinec]

> Another significant issue with digital movies and games is the inability to resell the content once you're done with it.

I get your point but I don't see how this could actually work. As a buyer, why would I buy an iTunes movie from someone else and not from iTunes? And as a seller, why would I sell it at a lower price than what it is on iTunes? It's not like it would come with a box that would look used/damaged, or a DVD with scratches on it.

[chucksmash]

> As a buyer, why would I buy an iTunes movie from someone else and not from iTunes?

Because it is the same thing, but cheaper.

> And as a seller, why would I sell it at a lower price than what it is on iTunes?

Because otherwise people won't buy it from you, they'll buy it from ITunes.

Even if the lower price doesn't make sense for digital media that aren't degraded through use, lower price (that lets you recoup, say, 90% of what you paid) would be needed to make people go through hassle of not just buying it "new."

[Avicebron]

True, and if the market economy was working as it should. Then if enough people were selling old digital music at lower prices, Itunes would have to lower their prices. Essentially what their doing is anti-competitive.

[adrianN]

You could even imagine an automated system where you buy a song for some two cents and then sell it back after you're done listening to it for a one cent. You could have users make their collections available on a market place and pay them some fraction of the profits you make.

[scarface74]

Music bought on iTunes hasn’t had DRM since 2009

[mattl]

Depends where you’re based. Japan had DRM on iTunes for some time and also DRM-free songs on iTunes were a paid upgrade globally for a while too.

[terinjokes]

The ability to upgrade was only available for songs purchaseable as DRM-free on iTunes. I still have tracks in my library with the DRM because the distributor went out of business, making it impossible to upgrade.

[shockeychap]

The only problem with this is that with physical media, there's an intrinsic amount of "friction" that prevents gaming the system. It's not convenient to, for example, have five people buy and share one set of DVDs. The hassle of moving the disc around (which gets dramatically worse with distance) incentivizes people to buy their own copy. But digital buying and selling would make it rather easy for one person to "sell" their movie to a friend for next-to-nothing and then "buy" it back when they want to use it. And we can be a thousand miles away with no problem.

There are ways to correct this, such as imposing reasonable floors on the sale price, or not permitting the sale of a title for something like 30 days after a transaction.

I'm just saying that these things would need to be factored into any proper solution, ideally via legislation.

[denton-scratch]

> There are ways to correct this

Those aren't "correcting" anything; the internet came along and stole their lunch. What needs correcting is the business model.

[necovek]

Loaning a copy to a friend, which is what your example basically is, should also be protected by consumer laws.

[shockeychap]

If you're talking about loaning a physical copy of a movie to a friend, sure. We have to make arrangements to get the "thing" from one location to another.

Surely you can understand that freely "loaning" digital copies - with none of the friction involved in physical media transport - would de-incentivize purchasing by others.

If you want that, fine. But that will jack up the price of movies, since a lot fewer of them will be sold.

[samdcbu]

We already have exactly this system for library e-book lending. There is a queue of people on the waitlist for a book and once loan period for the current reader is expires it is automatically loaned (no scare quotes because it is in every way a loan) to the next person in the queue.

I don’t see why the same couldn’t be done for other forms of media. Movies, albums, maybe even software licenses.

This system will likely result in a fairly minor decline in VOD revenue due to fewer individuals purchasing their own digital copy because they are once again able to loan works to others and take advantage of the same sharing of works that was taken for granted with physical media. If someone borrows a friends license to a movie to watch it once instead of being forced by the studios to buy or rent their own copy then there will be some lost revenue but I think that revenue only existed in the first place because of the walled garden scheme of owning nothing that exists right now. I also think if VOD licenses actually had value and guaranteed longevity they would be more appealing to consumers.

[shockeychap]

I don't disagree with any of this. The mechanisms that ensure that only one person at a time can consume the content in question provide appropriate friction to mirror most of the limitations of physical media.

I'm not a fan of the walled gardens of streaming and the you-own-nothing credo that goes with it. I'm just saying that we need to be fair to all sides with the solution.

[necovek]

With streamed digital copies, one can limit simultaneous playback. Simply "loaning" it in a service where you select who do you loan it to will add friction, and considering how any little friction (instead of torrenting or getting BR disks) is keeping people on streaming services anyway, it's unlikely it would move the needle too much.

[cxr]

> Simply "loaning" it in a service where you select who do you loan it to will add friction

Interesting observation! Digital-only copies traded in a form not comprising the embodiment in a physical "vessel" allow for a theoretically efficient handshake-and-exchange process, but in practice, there's lots of friction involved.

Grievance: "Hey, you can't do that! It's too easy!"

Response: "Easy? Have you ever used an app with a 10-foot UI that's controlled by a TV remote?"

See also: <https://xkcd.com/949/> ("File Transfer").

[frankfrankfrank]

The friction you are overlooking would be, e.g., the platform to sell the media and the likely cost to do so. Not only that, but you are also not aware of the fraudulent price that is charged for the media now precisely because the market is a monopolistic fraud. If movies were priced at what they are really worth, they would be some … and easily significantly … lower lower price, e.g., $.50 rent and $2 to buy.

If you want to evaluate how much the movies/content is really worth, just take the price you pay for a streaming service and divide it by the content you consume.

For example; $5 month, divided by 80 hours of viewing (which seems low for most) and you come to $0.06 per hour, or about $0.12 per movie. Using this conservative estimate, are you going to bother selling a digital movie for less than $0.12? No. But that is precisely why the industry has monopolized the market and added DRM, because they want to keep their fraudulent scheme going to deprive people of their earnings.

But what it’s really about is, as instituting a new form of slavery where you are given everything for “free” just like like slave of all other eras, but you are deprived of far more at a far greater intangible cost for it.

[antoinec]

I'd be curious to see if a system like that exists already for some kind of digital asset: secondary sales for something that is not limited in quantity, and can still be bought from the source at a higher price.

[carlgreene]

VST plug-ins have a pretty robust secondary marketplace. See kvraudio.com

[apetresc]

Certain NFT marketplaces have this characteristic.

[LegitShady]

@antoinec

steam does exactly this. you can sell on steam and pay steam their cut, or sell steam keys elsewhere for the same or more money without steam taking a cut.

[bigyikes]

>as a seller, why would I sell it at a lower price than what it is on iTunes?

A seller would do this to undercut iTunes, making a sale much more likely.

>As a buyer, why would I buy an iTunes movie from someone else and not from iTunes

Because the seller would likely price it lower than iTunes.

The real question is: how does this affect the digital goods market overall? Does allowing re-sale make iTunes unprofitable? Does it make movie production unprofitable?

[IanCal]

This I think is one of the places where smaller technical differences make things legitimately different. I'm not coming from the side of "it shouldn't be allowed" or "it must absolutely be allowed like physical goods".

Second hand items are often

* Lower quality, as they've been used * Lack consumer protections

The first just doesn't apply to digital goods and the second is much more minor (not expecting technical faults to become apparent after a while owning a digital item).

Selling physical goods also has a reasonable time commitment to it, you have to physically move things - there's friction. Digital goods could be sold between regular people near instantaneously. Buying a DVD and selling it after watching is do-able but still some work. Buying a film second hand the moment I press play and selling it on a market straight away after I stop watching seems trivial. I know this is ~rental, but theoretically users only need to buy in total enough copies for the concurrent number of watchers. A big enough market and this could impact how things are released, a "watch anytime" vs a "you really need to be up to date (e.g. sports)" would make a vast difference in total required copies floating around.

The resale value impacts the price you can sell at too. If a customer knows they can easily sell an item for 80% of what they bought it for, they're likely to be willing to pay more for it. However the customer also takes on more risk.

It feels like such a small change, but I can see it making a very large difference.

[mafuy]

I'd say this goes both ways. It's vastly easier and frictionless to sell content. It could and should also be easy to re-sell this content - it's only fair that both seller and buyer benefit from the properties of digital content.

[the_af]

> Does allowing re-sale make iTunes unprofitable?

I doubt it. Does reselling used physical books make the book publishing business unprofitable?

[iggldiggl]

I'd wager that physical vs. digital media does somewhat affect the outcomes here…

[the_af]

It probably does, I think mostly in the sense digital media is relatively new and misunderstood -- even today -- and publishers thought they could get away with an iron grip they simply could not have with physical stuff. So it's probably not that they lose profitability, but more that the extraordinary profit margins of digital get capped back to normality.

Disregarding piracy [1], if I can sell a digital item and lose access in the process (so that I'm not making duplicates out of thin air), then what's the harm? That it's easier and more efficient to do used sales this way? Well, aren't free market proponents all about efficiency? Or is it just when it doesn't affect their profits?

[1] If we don't disregard piracy, then all bets are off and whatever the publisher wants becomes irrelevant.

[iggldiggl]

> if I can sell a digital item and lose access in the process

Which is exactly the problem with digital media – how do you prove that to the satisfaction of everybody involved, i.e. especially the rightsholders?

On the one hand, the fact that almost all of the music market and parts of the e-book market for example operate without DRM shows that in those cases the publishers/labels have somewhat resigned themselves to trusting the users to remain relatively honest in that regard, but I suspect that a platform explicitly designed for reselling digital content would still draw some additional scrutiny of the unwanted kind.

Somewhat ironically, DRM would solve that particular problem – at the price of introducing additional restrictions during day-to-day usage that I wouldn't be happy about, though, either.

E.g. looking at my personal music library, it would likely restrict the choice of software players and good luck implementing that kind of personalised DRM with hardware media players which might not even have any kind of internet connection. I've also invasively (albeit losslessly reversible) applied replay gain adjustment to my whole media library because some media players and e.g. my car radio don't support the tagging-based adjustment, and in some rare cases I even had to edit some files [1], neither of which would be possible with DRM-protected files.

And of course it would introduce a continuing dependence on the existence of whoever is providing the DRM in order to access those media files you've supposedly "bought".

[1] The version of 3:47 EST on iTunes turned out to be missing the mouse squeak at the end – because of no DRM, I was able to find a complete, but otherwise slightly worse-sounding version (more surface hiss) on Youtube, lift the squeak off of it, de-noise it, and tack it onto my purchased version without having to lossily transcode that the main bulk of that song again.

[the_af]

> Which is exactly the problem with digital media – how do you prove that to the satisfaction of everybody involved, i.e. especially the rightsholders?

The platform and DRM. The single one use of DRM that would make sense, and it's disregarded.

> it would likely restrict the choice of software players

I'm confused. This has nothing to do with the matter at hand. For music, we've thankfully moved past DRM. For movies, right now you cannot play a movie you bought in one platform in another platform; that's already the status quo, so this would introduce no additional restrictions.

If you tweak and change your music files, that's a derived work, not the original work. You cannot edit up a physical novel and resell it, either. Regardless, music files have no DRM and they are not the topic of discussion.

[oneeyedpigeon]

As a buyer: to get it cheaper. As a seller: to obtain money for something you no longer value at its purchase price.

[frankfrankfrank]

It’s rather simple, because you want to sell it. If you want to hold out for selling it at market price while the buyer will prefer buying it directly from the source, then so be it, or if you want to sell it immediately, you price it at bargain prices or even free if you don’t care, i.e. value the item anymore. What we are witnessing here is a total destruction of markets and commerce between free humans.

What you and many are are also missing, including the author, is that the whole system is a fraud because the prices we asked to pay (I refuse) are fraudulent themselves because of it. You are “buying” a movie at a price, precisely because the whole system is rigged in a fraudulent manner where you are not able to actually own it and you are not able to sell it, and you can’t rent it or even lend it; therefore it is not actually a market price, it is a monopoly price based on cartel control and total cornering of the market. It’s essentially no different than the fraudulent price of diamonds or any of the frauds that have been prosecuted where people corner and manipulate the market of, e.g., onions, famously.

Some may have heard the phrase “you will own nothing and be happy” expressed by your global rulers. This topic is precisely manifestation of that and people don’t seem to realize it. You own nothing related to media that you think you own and you think you are happy for it, without yet realizing what a fraud and trap it is, even as the encirclement of slavery progresses all around us.

Especially in America there are many people who, if you were to look at closely, literally own not a single thing they think they have; and in many cases own less than they are even worth. Every single thing can be yanked out from under people like that on a whim … legally. A recent famous example of that is the Tesla that was disabled because Tesla didn’t like something. Slaves of the past were also “happy and didn’t own anything” since their healthcare was “free” and their groceries were “free” and their housing was “free”, etc.; all provided for “free” by government of and by the feudal lord or plantation owners.

In case people have forgotten the most relevant case of what the author writes about; remember when Amazon simply deleted a book from users’ kindles without even asking, let alone receiving consent? This was about 4 years ago now. That book that Amazon just disappeared off people’s devices with no evidence of their actions other than some coincidental proof of purchase people had retained … 1984.

[rvz]

Yes. That is the scam.

It's no different to the rest of them. If Stadia hasn't already taught anyone that it is a scam then I don't know what will.