Digital copies, exhaustion, and blockchains: lack of legal clarity to be offset by technological advancement and evolving consumption patterns?
"Buy digital": but are you really buying to own? Can you resell the books, CDs, and DVDs that you are no longer interested in having? The answer to this question is easy: usually, yes. But what about the case of ebooks, music tracks, and films downloaded from the internet? Well, here, the question is more difficult and - at least at the EU level - does not have a clear answer yet. The issue is particularly complex due to both practical and legal reasons. The following post can be accompanied by these slides I prepared for a recent lecture at Bocconi University in Milan. Degradation (or lack thereof) A perfect analogy between physical and digital copies of a work does not seem really possible to be drawn in the first place. Unlike analogue/physical copies (eg a book), in principle the digital copy of a work is not subject to any sort of appreciable degradation. If you read the same ebook five times, the quality of the copy you have remains substan...