[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.

[iggldiggl]

> I'm confused. This has nothing to do with the matter at hand.

Sorry, my fault, but I was looking at things from a more general perspective, as my impression is that there's not much of a second-hand market for non-DRM'd digital media, either.

Plus I was bringing up music in order to make a point that I wouldn't want to give up the lack of DRM just so I could more easily disprove any suspicion of copyright violation if I was to sell my music collection.

You're right though that given the situation we're currently in specifically with regards to movies and TV shows, DRM with transferrable licenses would still be better than the current situation we're in.