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> their first sale copyright doctrine is totally different from the US and most of the rest of the world

This sounds interesting but I couldn't discover what you mean in 30 seconds of googling. Explanation/source?




Not a lawyer nor even current on this, but from what I remember: In most of the world, if you sell a book or other physical media, the original manufacturer can't put meaningful restrictions on your resale of that product. This is a bit different with e-books, audiobooks, some kind of cloud software, etc., and to a great degree a lot of SAAS and software licensing as subscription vs. product is contributing to the demise of software resale. You can't resell Steam games or other stuff linked to your game; you used to have a pretty robust market for renting or second-hand selling movies on physical media, video games, etc.

There were weird games around VHS recordings of designed-for-rental being sold at $250/ea back in the 1980s, with the intended market being video rental shops charging $5/rental and doing 100 rentals to recoup their cost, before a few months/years later the prices for the movie dropped to $20-50 for individual users to buy. Video games usually were expensive up front for hot titles and cheaper later, but rental was a smaller fraction of the market -- with prerecorded video cassettes, rental was the primary market for new releases.

Japan has never (well, since 1868 and probably later -- not sure of when this originated) had this, so a product couldn't be resold. This probably lowers the initial price of some media somewhat (since the author/publisher can depend on future sales, vs. secondary market), but unclear how much of an impact it really has.

(This is all my memory from ~2000 when I ran an offshore datahaven and was at a Billboard music industry conference as they were trying to kill Napster; I assume things haven't changed that much except for the proliferation of subscription services, but it's possible laws have changed too.)




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