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Comment by azov | Hacker News Reader

Honestly, I don't give a rat's ass whether they call it buying or licensing. I want to be able to resell my digital goods. This is what needs to be legislated. If a company wants to enjoy legal protection agains someone breaking their DRM, they must provide a way to transfer licenses. This should be the law.

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I agree that the current status is a double standard, but I would prefer to resolve it in the other direction: I'd like to see no legal protection against breaking DRM, while allowing companies to sell anything to voluntary buyers under whatever terms they agree on.

FWIW, it's the EU's opinion.

http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2012-07/03/digital-softw...

But is it enforceable? I remember some internet drama about it a few months ago, but honestly don't know any place where you could resell license to download games and whatnot.

I personally know some people who make a new Steam account for each game they own and then they just sell the account on Ebay(and thus the game with it). It's against the terms of licence,but it works.

How about we reduce the number of laws? Perhaps repeal the anticircumvention clause of the DMCA as a start...

I like this. People always seem to say we need a law for this, that, or the other thing.

I don't see much of a difference between having a law to make something legal and having no law to make it illegal.

I suppose the difference might be that having a law keeps them (unspecified person/company) from doing something outrageous and then just saying 'well there isn't a law against it!'

You personally may not care which term is used. However, if you want to get the law changed, you probably need to get a large number of people interested in the issue. One way to do this would be to force the use of the word 'licensing', so that many oblivious consumers who assumed they were 'buying' goods are made aware of the difference.

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