this post was submitted on 01 Feb 2024
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Why is it legal to buy and sell used books/discs but illegal to buy and sell used digital files? (lemmy.world)
submitted 9 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
122 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

this contradiction always confused me. either way the official company is "losing a sale" and not getting the money, right?

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[–] [email protected] 67 points 9 months ago (1 children)

There's a few things about this

  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. 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.
  4. 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.
[–] [email protected] 14 points 9 months ago (3 children)

if you live in the EU you own your digital purchases.

[–] [email protected] 21 points 9 months ago (2 children)

It's kind of not tested though.

If you've never been given the option to download it and save it and use it from there, how would you "own" it if the streaming service takes it offline?

If you can't transfer ownership of something, or have it past the lifespan of the shop you bought it from, do you really own it? I would say not.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 9 months ago (1 children)

That's not the ownership though, that's a subscription to a service. Ownership is something like buying songs on iTunes not listening to them on Apple music.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 9 months ago (1 children)

You can buy individual movies on Amazon without a subscription. This doesn't mean you own it. If they stop hosting it, it's gone.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago (1 children)

But that is where the difference is, that's not streaming or at least not as the term is used. That was a purchase of a specific title.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 9 months ago

streaming

noun

a method of transmitting or receiving data (especially video and audio material) over a computer network as a steady, continuous flow, allowing playback to start while the rest of the data is still being received.

Whether it's subscribed, "purchased" or free, if you don't have the full file to copy and do what you want with it, it's streaming.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 9 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 5 points 9 months ago

That's software, and frankly until you can transfer a played game to somebody else in Steam, it's not something that is enforced.

They cannot "oppose it" according to that, but you cannot do it.

But buying a digital movie from Amazon or Sony? They can take that away. Haven't heard a peep from the EU on it.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 9 months ago

You do not. Or we have a different definition for owning.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago

I'm in the EU. How do I download movies I purchased on Amazon?