[DonQuigleone]

Originally Posted by Xellos-_^

which is why i haven't purchase either Civ5 or SC2. I buy games, i don't lease them. if the game industry wants me to lease games, then they won't be getting my money.

You can't own a game. It's like owning music. You don't "own" the music. Ownership implies you can do modify it and sell it to whoever you want. Resale is meaningful in the case of physical objects as in their case the object has physical value. The intellectual value of the care design is far less valuable then the car itself. And really, software has always been a "license" or "lease" system. Noone has ever owned their software as then you'd have permission to replicate it on masse. Ownership implies you can do what you want with it.

Originally Posted by Tiberium Wolf

Selling 2nd hand game is the same as everything else you sell in 2nd hand.

Look! You have at home tons of old games. You don't even touch them and they are taking space. Now you have 3 options:
1- get more space
2- garbage
3- sell it.
It's pretty obvious you would go to with 3rd option. Same thing for every other thing. If you ppl wanna compare with cars then ppl that are buying 2nd hand cars are hurting the automobile industry and the planet by using inefficient old machines.

There's a very big difference between a car and software:

Cars degrade, an old car is noticeably worse then a new one (and that's even if they're the same model). Games are always the same quanlity regardless of when they're sold, or how many people have owned it.

Cars a utility, games are entertainment. Owning a car gives you value, owning a game after you have finished it rarely gives you any value.

Most of the cost of a car is in it's building, negligible costs of a game is in it's manufacture.

Originally Posted by TigerII

Which is why I rent 90% of what I play. After I beat a game, I almost never play it again, so it makes no sense for me to pay for a new game I will play once. Unfortunately for me publishers hate renters and it will surely be gone soon. Everything will be DDL games. When that occurs I probably will be out of game, just can't afford it.

As for movies, it is outrageous the cost for them. Again, I watch movies once, maybe twice. Again I rent. 2.59 for one night, walk two blocks and return it.

Nothing really wrong with renting. Renting your money does go to the original manufacturer, in the form of the license fee. However rent places are disappearing as no one wants to do it. Why rent when you can download it in 5 minutes?

Originally Posted by Nightbat®

On what planet are you living on?
A DVD/CD/etc, with whatever is on it (even nothing) is a product
In life, I'm allowed to sell everything I have, but you claim this doesn't apply to 'media'?

What's next? Carmanufacturers claiming their old cars are still theirs (hey they designed it, they 'drew' the blueprints)
The guy who originally made the house you are living in gets x% of your morgage for the next 70 years after his death?

The difference is that a standard product has physical value, and you derive value from continuing to own it. Media has no physical value (any more), and once you've used it, it ceases to have any continued value to you, it's like a book, but books usually degraded very quickly, so the issue never came up.

To kill another analogy: I don't own the themepark, yet I am allowed to sell the ticket I just bought to someone else, same as the movietheatre, same as a ticket to the races or a concert

You are able to sell the ticket before you use it, but not afterwards. Of course, technically a game is an unlimited use ticket, but actually if you look at theme parks that offer unlimited use( or a season) tickets, those tickets are always non-transferrable, and registered to a single person. There is, of course, good reason for this. And actually, now that I've looked it up, many normal theme park tickets are in fact non-transferable.

Originally Posted by Gamer_2k4

While I understand the rationale behind calling a game purchase a license instead of ownership, I still don't think that should have any impact on whether or not it can be legally resold. You can't compare it to an amusement park ride, because that's essentially a service. It's like paying a guy to wash your car and then expecting him to do it twice. It's not a good; it's not a physical thing. A game disc IS a physical thing, no different from a book. And we can resell books, can't we?

The thing about a CD, a video game, or anything else like that, is that it doesn't get depleted as you use it. In that regard, it's no different from a book, a car, a toaster, a pair of sunglasses, or any other physical good. Yes, if I buy sunglasses from you instead of from a store, the company loses a sale. BUT THAT'S HOW IT'S WORKED SINCE BUSINESS BEGAN. Games shouldn't be exempt, and justifying it by calling a game a "license" is simply burying the issue in semantics.

Cars and and other standard goods do get depleted as you use them. A car after 10 years of driving requires far more regular maintenance etc.

Sure, you can argue that the "experience" has nothing to do with the physical form of the game disc. But, strictly speaking, that's not true. The shape of a disc (that is, the grooves burned into it) is what determines the experience you get. It matters little that you require certain hardware to draw out that experience. A fan as a physical shape doesn't do anything by itself; you have to supply electricity to make it turn. Sunglasses are useless except when you're outside. A car engine isn't any good unless you have a car to put it in. And yet, all of those things are considered goods you buy, not services you license.

You're talking about utilities. In software terms, a car is a lot more like MS office. Resale of MS office is a lot more justified as you lose something when you sell it on. Likewise you lose something when you sell your car. When you sell a game after playing it, you lose very little, just the ability to replay it later, which you will likely never use. Also, these days we're moving into an age where games will not be delivered on physical media. We can't argue it has any physical presence anymore. Also, you can't copy a car or sunglasses. You can (very easily) copy media.


[quote]

Originally Posted by synaesthetic

I don't give a god damn what the media companies say. I will sell my old stuff if I'm not using it anymore.

This is just as much horseshit as Apple trying to claim jailbreaking an iPhone is against the DMCA.

This is stupid. If you buy something, it belongs to YOU. What you do with it after buying it is up to you, NOT to the company that made it. Any laws that make this false are by definition fucking retarded and should be deleted.

Seriously, corporations? If you keep treating people like shit, eventually they're going to get pissed and stop giving you money. This whole piracy thing is a self-fulfilling prophecy. The gatekeepers spend millions upon millions to fight piracy with restrictive DRM and draconian IP laws, and all it does is make more and more people want to just say FUCK THIS STUPID SHIT and start torrenting.

It's more justifiable to jailbreak the iphone as you actually physically own it. I also am in entirely in agreement that all the DRM and IP stuff is counter-productive. I'm more talking about the ethics of it in itself, I'll address it further later.

Piracy is just their excuse, a convenient scapegoat. They know piracy will always exist and will never stop. They know it's inevitable, but it's an easy out when confronted with the cold reality that Sturgeon's law is in full effect here. It's easier to point a finger at pirates to distract people away from the fact that their product is selling like shit.

I don't think it's entirely unjustified. A lot of media businesses have gone out of business, look at music. Tower records is gone, and other stores that previously only stocked music are now stocking all types of media, games movies etc. They do have to move with the times though.


The crux of my ethical argument over why buying second hand isn't much better then piracy is this. We live in an age where we can pretty much access anything we want for free. We've all downloaded stuff illegally at one point or another, I myself have as well. I usually download stuff I'm on the fence over. I do, though, buy the game if I like it, or I like the developers previous work. Why? Simply because I like their work, and I'd like to see them make more, and I'd like to see them make money from it. So if I was going to pay for the game, I'm going to damn well make sure that money gets to them. Buying second hand none of that money goes to them. Instead I'm just paying some guy I don't know. From the point of view centred on me that's not so different from just paying some chinese guy. Either way, I may as well have pirated, because it's the same end result concerning the group I'm concerned with (the developers).

So if you do like what a game company makes, you should buy new. I don't see the point in buying second hand when you can just pirate for basically the same result.

But I don't think second hand buying is wrong per se, just pointless. Obviously the industry has problems with it though...