On Fri, 27 Jan 2012 19:02:09 PST, "Zach C." said: > If you buy an album used, the seller generally loses possession of it, you > gain possession of it at a reduced cost, and the original purchase still > gave the original seller and producer value.
Note that if I shoplift a CD that sucks and isn't worth the $14.99 sticker price, I have deprived the producer of the ability to sell it to somebody else. That's the crucial point that underlies our social concept of "theft" - if I take it from you, you don't have it anymore. If I copy an album that isn't worth the sticker price, and which I would not have purchased at that price, two things of note happen: 1) As much as the labels wish it were so, they can't count that as "lost revenue" because it wouldn't have acccrued to them anyhow, any more than a car dealership can legitimately call it "lost revenue" if I walk onto their lot, tell the salescritter they're crazy if they think I'll pay $28K for a given car, and walk off the lot. (Now, if they want to count the "Damn, we lost the $4.99 that guy *would* have paid if we charged that instead of $14.99", they're welcome to that. :) 2) More importantly, they still have the original bits and are free to look for other suckers who *will* pay $14.99. For the record, all my media is legitimately acquired, though a large portion *was* obtained used and if the producers don't like that, they're welcome to go re-read "first sale doctrine" ;) Just trying to make people actually engage their neurons - this stuff is *not* easy to sort out, because intellectual property and digital information do *not* behave the same as cars and cows in the physical world, and unintended consequences of policy decisions are all *over* the place. (DMCA anti-circumvention clause prohibiting me from fair-use accessing my own media, I'm looking at you. :)
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