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Comment by tonyhart7 | Hacker News Reader

"Anything that you BUY needs to be your property."

do you own the film when you buy ticket to cinema ????

The film is going to be projected anyways. You are buying the right to be present in the room when that happens. You can transfer that right (give the ticket to someone else), even sell it. Before the projection happens, the company might want to close and cancel that projection, in which case you are left without the chance to attend and exercise your purchased service; in that case, the company would (should) refund your full money.

Now change "attend the cinema" with "play a videogame" in those phrases. We should be able to freely exchange games between us. I should be able to sell them to you. The medium (digital, physical) is irrelevant.

"We should be able to freely exchange games between us"

no, because you already play it

Are you saying that we should not be able to buy a book, read it, and then exchange them with each other?

You should not be able to read a book or watch a DVD movie and afterwards give it to a sibling or friend, or leave it on a bench on the street for someone else to pick up?

I don't care if the medium is physical or digital, we should be able to, and OUGHT to do those things.

You confuse yourself with purchase of physical goods vs license

The whole point of the discussion is that if we're moving to a digital world, we should not go to a worse state than before. So if we were able to lend a game disc before, we should still be able to lend a digital copy in this great new fully digitalized world. That we're not able to, is precisely what's wrong with the transition. We had physical ownership of a disc, and companies have replaced that with immensely more limited usage licenses, which is bad.

No but you don’t expect the cinema to stop the movie half way through without giving you a refund, and would expect that you could legally resell a purchased ticket to your friend if you can’t attend the screening.

But that's not what's happening here - Sony can't take physical disks you own away from you.

As for resale, interesting you bring up tickets as scalping / reselling them is a major issue, which is also hostile to consumers as they can pay multiples of the original selling price for high profile concerts and events, which has led to legislation and / or industry rules that prevent resale or at least prevent it through 3rd party services so that they can manage the resale price (and take their share a second time).

Scalping is not a serious risk with digital goods. When the company can sell an infinite number of licenses, there is zero risk of a third party coming in and buying up a significant fraction of the capacity and overcharging people.

No, we were talking about cinemas, not live shows. Stop moving the goal posts.

Yeah the OP doesn't understand licensing, seems to only think of purchase in terms of physical goods, and is trying to poorly apply their reasoning based on that.

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