First-sale doctrine states that once a product is sold legally, all rights pertaining to that individual product are transferred to the person who bought it. For example, if you buy a book, car, house, etc. the person who originally made it has no further control over it, and you can use it, modify it, re-sell it, etc. however you want.
The problem is that digital media, without copy protection, can be copied a more or less infinite number of times. For example, you can buy a CD, rip the music off of it onto a hard drive, then re-sell the CD while still holding a copy of the intellectual property on it. It's an example of technology outgrowing previous statutes. A big part of the problem is that the people writing the laws don't have a full understanding of the subject matter, and in many cases industry lobbyng organizations can define what the so-called "facts" are.
With console games, you are by and large still required to have the game in the drive to make use of the content, and they are much harder to duplicate than a PC game, for example, due to the limitations of the system. This should make them fall under first-sale doctrine, but you've got to remember the people who are actually deciding what's legal in this area are the same people who think that playing Doom instantly turns teenagers into mass-murdering dog rapists.
The industry feels that anything that costs them profits, legal or not, has to be done away with, and they have a powerful and well-organized lobby to push those goals. What I find more disturbing, however, is that the first-sale doctrine itself is now under attack. Instead of trying to find loopholes around it, many lobbies outside the music, movie, and games industries are slowly, subtly trying to redfine the entire doctrine if not do away with it entirely.
The worst by far is Apple, in my opinion. They're basically trying to tweak the laws in such a way that they retain full rights over individual devices sold legitimately to end-users. Basically, they're trying to tweak the legal language so that any "purchase" of their products becomes an open-ended lease with a single one-time payment. That way, the transaction is conducted in exactly the same way, but the seller retains ALL rights to the product vis-a-vis modification (they will brick your iPhone if you "jailbreak" it), re-sale, et cetera. They're only one example, though. Even the auto companies are trying to pull the same shit.
Basically, consumer rights are eroding faster and faster as lobbies become more powerful and organized. In the US at least, Congress isn't doing fuck-all to prevent it either, on either side of the aisle.
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Topic: Sony PS4 DRM? (Read 17855 times)