martyf Smack-Fu Master, in training
15y
63
You can't buy digital content.
You can only buy physical goods.
You never bought the digital content.

I think it should be illegal to use the word "buy" for a digital content license.

Why can't you buy digital content? Well, I read over the comments, and I was very surprised to see that nobody here has mentioned the fact that "First Sale Doctrine" does not apply to digital media. (Wikipedia).

In simplest terms, if you buy a copyrighted work in physical form, you can sell the physical form, rent it, loan it, whatever, all you want. You just can't make and sell a copy of the work that the form conveys.

The first sale doctrine does not apply to digital content (media and software) unless the seller of the digital content specifically grants you a license to sell the digital content (and, with some exceptions for software resellers, nobody does this.)

A streaming media company like Redbox, Amazon, Apple, whatever, rarely/never owns all the content they "sell" - they have a contract to be allowed to sell licenses to the content they have licensed in large and expensive deals. It's licenses all the way down.

At no time are the intellectual property rights to the content sold in this chain of sales.

When you "buy" digital content, you are buying nothing more than a license for unlimited replay of a media item, using technologies the seller deems appropriate for the replay of their content. That is all you're buying. A license. And the license may or may not transfer to another party in a bankruptcy. And the license may be revoked as a result of a dispute between the holder of the intellectual property rights and the distributor of the playback licenses.

But there is no good answer to this problem that conforms to the notion of copyright law as it is. Ultraviolet gave it a try, but it got so convoluted that it collapsed under the weight of it's own terms and conditions.

The economics of digital content are broken. The best we seem to come up with are advertising and subscriptions, sales are not really possible. Pirating and Streaming work really well at everything but getting the people who made the content paid.

Pirating content - that is obtaining a copyrighted work without the authorization of the copyright holder is, under numerous laws, theft. You can't just declare, "they didn't sell it to me, so I can just take it" and pretend there was no violation of the laws.

But, to be clear, I think that using the terminology of a sales transaction - specifically the word "Buy" - for streaming content is, put simply, fraudulent, misleading, etc etc...

Yes, in legal terms, I have "bought" a "right" that can be revoked - for example, I can buy a fishing license, but that license can be taken away for various reasons - but I think that most normal people do not see the purchase of a movie for their kids as something that can be taken away.

I'm not sure what the answer is here. An optical disc does not cost the rights holder or distributor anything once the physical object is sold; it does not matter if the seller goes out of business. Streaming media has perpetual costs that rise. If revenue does not offset the costs of the petabytes of storage and bandwidth needed to operate a well-rounded media library, it just vanishes. Even transferring it to the public domain isn't economically viable because of the costs needed to keep the media online.

In Star Trek, they allude to the huge economic disruptions caused to society by free energy, we're having a similar, smaller disruption to the "media" sector.