arstechnica.com — What's the legal status of all that digital media the young people spend so much money on at iTunes and Amazon? Do they own it? Can they sell it? What about those Steam games? Can you resell that unopened copy of AutoCAD even though the EULA forbids it?Welcome to the murky "post-sale" world in the digital age.
Dec 18, 2008 View in Crawl 4
locojonesDec 18, 2008
You make the logical mistake of assuming that just because you own the disc, you own what is on it. That is, in general, not the case. You own the disc, and merely have permission to use what is on it.
maanwiDec 19, 2008
I may be issued a license agreement when I buy music, but it isn't the agreement that I'm purchasing. Nobody purchases an agreement, which is just the terms of the sale, not the object. You pay for the COPY, when you buy a digital file, and its ownership is yours, under the first sale doctrine.
bipolarruledoutDec 19, 2008
Wouldn't it be nice if you could simply sign into a website and purchase whatever licenses you want? Such a service would not have to be concerned with where you obtain such content but would take care of paying the parties in question. I own many albums that you simply can't buy online even if you wanted to.
unitedatheismDec 19, 2008
I only play cartridges that I own, in fact.Not because I'm afraid of the man or anything, it's only because I don't want to spend time learning other games when I can have all the fun and nostalgia I used to have when I was a kid.Just to name a few: Phantasy Star, Dodge Ball, Kenseiden, Rock n' Roll Racing, Fantasy Zone 2 and Gunstar Heroes, why would I want to play crappy unreleased games? (I know, there were one or two good unreleased games each hundred, but that's about the same ratio for good released games/bad released games)And it ended up in me buying kid chameleon, which I already have, for Wii, just because I wanted to play Kid Chameleon again on my big tv, I should have download the game to play on via wad manager/homebre channel since I don't have to pay again for the same game, but back that time I was feeling lazy...
unitedatheismDec 19, 2008
How about this scenario:RIAA knocks on your door insisting that you do have pirated mp3sYou then show them that all your mp3s were bought from someone else.Now they will have to pursue this/these other person/people to ensure that the original buyer destroyed the cd or deleted it from his disk.It's a pain in the ass situation for RIAA, but somehow I don't give a f**k.....
carlososDec 19, 2008
@WillDearborn, you can buy all those games separately but because it is a bundle with multiple games, you get a discount which is cheaper than buying 3 of the 5 games.Not only was the bundle cheaper but many people were able to give the extra copies to a friend.