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Comment by nathan_long | Hacker News Reader

>> The economy gets a nice boost from people buying the stuff again, instead of getting it in a re-sale.

No, this is not a boost. This is a tremendous, horrible loss of value.

Imagine people throwing away furniture, crushing cars, and burning books because they can't be sold. This is value being destroyed.

Please read up on the "broken window fallacy." There is a difference between spending to create value and spending to replace destroyed value. The latter makes everyone poorer.

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"The works of the roots of the vines, of the trees, must be destroyed to keep up the price, and this is the saddest, bitterest thing of all. Carloads of oranges dumped on the ground. The people came for miles to take the fruit, but this could not be. How would they buy oranges at twenty cents a dozen if they could drive out and pick them up? And men with hoses squirt kerosene on the oranges, and they are angry at the crime, angry at the people who have come to take the fruit. A million people hungry, needing the fruit- and kerosene sprayed over the golden mountains. And the smell of rot fills the country."

Not going to happen, a completely absurd extrapolation of the 2nd circuit's ruling.

>Imagine people throwing away furniture, crushing cars, and burning books because they can't be sold. This is value being destroyed.

It's "use value" being destroyed, not "economic value".

This is the reason why economies get a huge boost after a war: because stuff has to be bought again, infrastructures have to be re-built, etc... (the well-being of the society is taken back, of course, but economy itself, i.e levels of employment and development rise, because forces before non utilized (unemployed people, savings, etc) have to be utilized. And the disturbed status quo brings up opportunities for growth in areas stifled before by established players.

>Please read up on the "broken window fallacy."

I'm not making the same argument.

With a good such as an e-book, if you could read it and then re-sale it, then there would just be one copy sold by the parent company. If it could be resold even more, then from one original buyer you could get 10 meta-buyers, all of them not giving a penny to the author.

(And those are not pirates, in which case you wouldn't know if they would have bought it if they couldn't get it for free. Those are actual buyers).

So, in essence, the author loses 1/average_resales. That might be good for other companies and the economy in general (as per the "broken window fallacy"), but it's not for the PARTICULAR industry under discussion.

Heck, the author might be financially forced to give up writing altogether, all the while enough people to sustain him _enjoy_ and _pay_ for his book.

You're only considering economic value from the point of view of the original creator. Shops that resell things derive economic value from the sale of the used goods. They provide the service of consolidating and coalating these goods into a single place (and repairing them from a broken state in other cases).

If you're going to consider that the author "looses" a sale because of a resold, used physical book (which was the original subject, not ebooks), then you should factor in the losses due to not allowing resales at all - because such books are much riskier investments and are less likely to be bought in the first place, especially if they are technical books with non-trivial prices. I've convinced myself to buy many a book because I knew I could resell them easily and legally if I didn't like them.

This is similar to videogames resale (Another area under heavy attack by the publishing industry).

If a title is middling, but not great, people will still buy it, and hope to sell it for cash or store credit once "done". They will experiment with games they're not certain about because they're not "Stuck" with the original.

People who aren't willing to take the risk that the game is worth full price can then buy the resold version at a lower price later. They take a "Newness" and time premium, but save money.

If resale isn't possible, fewer people will buy the original game because it's a riskier proposition. This means both that there are less primary sales, but ALSO that there are less people discussing the game (They've not played it, they can't talk about it). People who would have bought the game secondhand, possibly liked it and been encouraged to buy the next title by the same developers firsthand simply won't buy it, so there's even LESS word of mouth.

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