[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.