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Comment by gjsman-1000 | Hacker News Reader

> To play devils advocate, couldn’t that allow a single purchase of a movie to be watched by millions of people? At which point no studio would sell it digitally.

You're not thinking creatively enough. One day, somebody's going to use the law and make the "sales" API-driven. This will then turn it into a rental service where you can "buy" a game for two hours for $37.50 and then "sell" the game back to the mother ship for $36.50 of credit. The mother ship being, of course, whatever VC firm puts millions into having the world's largest Steam account.

I don't have to like the current ecosystem of no-transfers and DRM, to acknowledge breaking all that down would have major economic consequences against studios. Right now is especially not the time to be asking for this, because the whole video game industry is in deep financial trouble at the moment.

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Isn't that just a (expensive) library? And libraries are constantly being lobbied against by publishing groups, yet there doesn't seem to be major harm (financial) caused by them.

The difference is that libraries are local and so the impact is minimal.

With software you can share it out to anyone in the world.

Why is this worse than a company renting out physical copies, though? This is the way games rentals work for physical copies. The renter buys one copy and rents it out numerous times. (It's also the way libraries work for books, of course.)

The amount of time makes a practical difference.

Books you take out for a week or more usually, games rentals and films (from the olden days when I'd get to go to an actual store) were at least several days.

Renting a film is something you could do from the second you start watching it to the second it finishes. Going from a few days to hours makes this in the region of 10-100 times faster turnaround.

Having to physically move things just adds significant time.

I'm still not seeing it the issue, though. A significant portion of the world's population lives within a short distance of a library. Even if each individual library branch serves a relatively small chunk of the population, the collection of libraries effectively makes a global network that enables people to almost instantaneously rent books, movies, and games. Having this exist out in the world really doesn't ruin things.

It's nowhere near instantaneous for physical items. I live near a library and it's a drive or a half hour walk away, open a few days a week during shortened times. That's nothing like clicking a button and renting a film for exactly the length I watch it for.

Oh dear, imagine if people bought a bunch of books, let’s say Harry Potter, and then let anyone come in and read books for a fee! Or even rent them! would be horrible!

Isn’t it hilarious how having property rights and freedoms over Things You Paid For is now unthinkable??

The challenge with digital goods is having a system where multiple people can have property rights.

Digitising your library example, would likely result in a price of zero. Someone like Apple would be well placed to turn its books app into a library of books it purchased once. And use this to get more hardware sales.

The current system of only one entity having rights isn’t desirable. But alternatives aren’t easy. Even if you tried to rule out sales for profit then marketplaces and bulletin boards would make things complicated.

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