| numonex said: I'm surprised Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft haven't all pushed for second hand game / software sales to be deemed illegal purely on that point. It wouldn't surprise me at all for it to happen within the next 5 years. With the current glut of games I often see new release games drop to half price within 2-3 months, makes me wonder how the market can survive. I'm expecting another video games crash like back in the 80s. |
I have no doubt the the software companies would try to get it declared illegal, expect that the very copyright law which prevent piracy explicitly declares the second hand market totally legal; its called the First Sale Doctrine; it was created in 1908, and officially added to U.S. copyright laws in 1976. Copyright is intended to make tangle what is intangible; if anyone can copy something, then it loses its value. First sale does this too; if you cannot sell something, then it also loses value.
Copyright is just that, the right to make legal copies, but once those copies are made and sold, the owner of the copies has the right to pass ownership to someone else. Piracy is making illegal copies, someone buys one copy, then releases thousands, possibly millions of copies to other people, while the creator only makes the one sale. In the second hand market, someone buys it, then sells that copy to someone else; the creator made one sale, and at no time does more than one person use the copy; the first person has forfeited all rights to the copy in the second hand sale.
What you're really complaining about is that costs have sky rocketed, and devlopers have allowed it to happen; instead of trying to control costs to maintain financial solvency, they are lashing out at anything that they see as limiting their ability to sell, illegal or legal. This also includes competition from other developers; too many games by too many developers, means less money for any particular developer, and those expensive games become expensive flops.
I agree with HappySquirrel, it's easy for someone to make the case that a second hand sale is a lost sale for the creator, but the opposite is also true; if you remove the right to resale, someone who buys a bad game and can't get rid of it will be a lot less likely to open their wallet in the future, sticking only with games that they are sure of. And if they get stung by a "surefire" game, expect them to close their wallets even more, and possibly stop gaming entirely.
Veder Juda is hand crafted from EPIC FAIL, and is a 96% certified Looney; the other 4% is a work in progress.
