Fair use laws, creative commons licenses, and copyright regulations in general seem to dominate a lot of discussions online.  Questions of protecting intellectual property while maintaining freedom of use carry heavy opinions from multiple sides.  Recently there’s been a series of arguments that go beyond just the normal questions of piracy.  Second hand sales are starting to receive special interest from companies.

The economic reason is that, obviously, every time an item is sold second hand the original creator receives no income for that item.  Aside from taxes; all the money from a second hand sale stays with the store.  Institutions such as Gamestop® have found this to be a very lucrative practice.  This is neither a new practice nor a new issue as companies have been placing “not for resale” tags on demo discs and end user license agreements for some time.  These tags have been unsuccessful in preventing end users from reselling or purchasing used equipment.  A court case in early 2009 over the resale of used AutoCAD software was ruled in favor of the defendant, Timothy Vernor.  Nancy Gohring, a journalist for Techworld.com, writes, “The judge also agreed with Vernor’s argument that owners of software have “first sale” rights under copyright law, which entitles them to “sell or dispose of” the copy they bought.”

First sale rights maintain that once an item is given to someone, be that through sale or promotion, all rights belonging to that item are theirs to keep or loose.  While companies can try to control the amount of second hand products on the market they can’t prevent people from doing as they see fit.  Regulations, such as requiring ID and additional store certifications, have been put in place to make it more difficult to sell second hand items but sale continues anyway.  Some game companies have proceeded to place unlock codes within new games to promote purchasing only first hand software.  The game is incomplete without the code and second hand purchases would require purchasing a new code directly from the company for an additional fee.

The issue, like that for copyright infringement, is “who gets the money?”  Technically, second hand sellers receive money legally for work done by someone else.  While it could be argued that it isn’t money the company would have received originally, since the buyer probably would not have purchased the item originally, the physical manifestation of someone’s intellectual property is still being sold by someone else.  Both sides stay completely legal in their attempts to make more money from the sale of the same item.  The question would be who does the end buyer think should be the one to get said money? 

Image taken from GamerAce

Gohring, Nancy. “In Autodesk case, judge rules secondhand sales OK.” TechWorld. N.p., 2 Oct. 2009. Web. 12 Nov. 2010.