StingingVelvet: As many cases as you can cite I could probably find cases that go toward my point as well, like the digital millennium act or whatever the heck that thing was called.
I encourage you to actually look for such cases. It'll be educational for you, and if you manage to find key cases that I'm not aware of then I'll get to learn something as well. However, seeing as you're not willing to take the 3 minutes it would take to look up the difference between legislation and case law (what I cited is the latter, the DMCA is the former, each has their specific place in the legal system), or even take the 5 seconds required to Google the actual name of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, I think we're both quite aware that the chance of you actually looking up any case law is pretty close to zero.
If you choose to surprise me, however, a couple of phrases that are a good place to start your search are "first-sale doctrine" (for US case law) and "exhaustion doctrine" or "exhaustion of rights" (for European case law). I'll also save you some time and let you know that the DMCA doesn't have anything in it directly relevant to ownership of resale of copyrighted works, and most focuses on liability and enforcement surrounding copyright infringement (as defined by existing statutes). It also allows boat hull designs to be copyrighted (if you care for useless trivia).
StingingVelvet: This debate is about what I think should be the case, and I think uses sales of media should be ended. It turns game stores into pawn shops, it lets millions (in the case of popular console games) play the game without ever giving the developers or publishers a dime, and perhaps most important it makes no sense in the future digital market, where games are run from accounts and used sales would allow for sharing a game to the point no AAA game could be profitable.
Counterpoint: Sales of used goods allow for societal resources to be used more efficiently, resulting in billions of dollars worth of goods to continue to circulate in the economy, and allowing the money that might otherwise go towards purchasing new versions of those used goods (which would otherwise become wasted resources) to be put to more productive uses (from an economic standpoint). So we've got billions of dollars of society's resources being used more efficiently balanced against game companies wanted to milk customers for more money. Show of hands on which one should win out. Yeeaahhh, that's pretty much what I thought.
But don't fret, because all of this is irrelevant. Why? Because game companies currently don't have anyone dictating to them whether or not used sales must be allowed. If they want to distribute games in a way that used sales are neither permitted nor reasonably possible there's already plenty of options available to them. Yet those morons don't seem to be clued into this fact as they're still selling copies that can be resold. And to top that, there are even folks like those mouth-breathers at Stardock who are trying to make resale possible with downloaded games. It's like they think consumers actually place
value on being able to resell games. Idiots. Wait, what? Many customers
do place value on being able to resell games? And many wouldn't be willing to pay as much if they weren't able to recoup some of the cost by reselling? Whoa, I guess that changes things a bit.
Alright, I think I'm done burying the needle on sarcasm meters. But, to be serious, game companies are indeed perfectly capable of preventing resales if they want to, but they're also quite aware that this will result in many customers not willing to pay as much if this fact is presented upfront, and if it's hidden then customers tend to get pretty mad about being dicked-over with a bait-and-switch. Now, for some genres and games resale isn't as much of a point of value for customers, and in these cases you do indeed see companies moving to distribution models that prevent resale. While with other genres and games the companies realize that preventing resales would be suicide for them, and thus resales happily carry on. Of course, this doesn't prevent some of these companies from whining and posturing about used sales, but company heads being pissed that the market doesn't give them a license to print money is nothing new.
