It’s science. Deal with it.
We hear an awful lot about how copyrights on creative works “stifle innovation,” preventing new business opportunities from launching or thriving. And the self-serving advocates of these “new” ideas love to describe those of us who question their proposals as anti-technology, anti-progress, stuck in old models, and so on. But the idea that a digital file of a song, a movie, a book, etc. can ever be called “used” is nothing more than an attempt to transplant a very old model into the soil of a new, technological market. So, who’s being anachronistic here?
On purely technical grounds, there is literally no such thing as used digital media because “use” does not in anyway degrade a file. A digital file of a song or a movie plays as pristinely the millionth time it’s played as it does the first time it’s played. If you worked in video post-production in the days of early digital tape media, you would have seen a new term affixed on the spines of those tapes — clone. Because that’s what a digital “copy” actually is; it is an exact replica with no generation loss from the original source.
So, if you transfer a file of a song or a movie to someone else, it will not in any sense be “used” simply because you experienced it before someone else did. The new “owner” of that file will have a brand new experience, the value of which is identical to the original “owner’s” purchase price of the file from the original distributor. If we’re talking about a movie, for instance, the only thing that differentiates Viewer A from Viewer B is that the former has seen the film and the latter has not. Yet, the logical argument being made by certain “new model” entrepreneurs is that Viewer B should be entitled to pay less for the identical experience simply because Viewer A has already paid the original price one time. This is patently absurd. By the same logic, the ticket price for a movie in a theater ought to decrease incrementally after each screening because the film has been “used” by other viewers. (Yeah, somebody in the copyleft crowd just thought, “Hey, that’s a good idea!”)
This notion of “used” digital media is just one way in which technological opportunists can be disingenuous when it comes offering up what sound like market-based theories. They want the luxury of cherry picking from both the past and the present as suits their purposes. In reality, though, these ideas don’t come from particularly innovative technologists, but rather from standard-issue middlemen looking to exploit a consumer-serving limitation on copyrights to siphon value from creators and line their own pockets. In the long run, though, transporting this doctrine into the digital market, which makes no rational sense, would likely drive prices up in what I’ll call first-user experiences in order to offset lost revenue.
Naturally, when a work is distributed on physical media, the notion of “used” remains intact. First sale doctrine in copyright law says that I can buy a novel and then sell the book as used at my next yard sale, regardless of whether or not I read it to a dogeared pulp or kept it in pristine condition and never cracked it open. The condition of the book may affect the second-market value in my yard sale, but it has no bearing on my right to sell or otherwise distribute the used copy one time. Because this transaction involves a physical object, replicating the process even in tens of thousands of yard sales all over the country would never produce a secondary market for novels that clones the primary market and inherently reduces the value of all novels everywhere.
But this is exactly what would happen in an all-digital “used” market in which a middle-man like Amazon, Apple, or Redigi removes a previously purchased file from Consumer A’s computer, sells it to Consumer B for a lower price than the original, and profits from the transaction while kicking a little something back to Consumer A. Never mind how easy it would be for the selling consumer to cheat that system by storing files any number of ways, the so-called “secondary” market would very rapidly become the primary (i.e. only) market, and therefore just another means by which tech-happy leaches artificially drive the value of creative works below sustainable levels while pocketing millions before the producing entities collapse. (Anyone who just thought “Good, I can’t wait until the movie studios, record labels, and publishers collapse,” should understand that it will be the independent, small and mid-sized producers who will fail first.)
I find it hard to believe that any legislator or court would be bamboozled by the parlor trick in which a file is moved from one consumer to another through the resale transaction without making a “new copy.” This is an analysis of the state of the technology and its role in the market viewed through a pre-digital lens, semantically bogged down in irrelevant terms like “copy” while ignoring how the technology actually works and what its potential market impact can be for good or bad. So, if we’re really talking about developing new business models that correspond with new technology, then the language we employ might have to be new as well. And in the digital world, the word used has outlived its usefulness.