The issue you're skirting is the distortion of economic principles that currently surrounds digital works. Lacking intervention the marginal cost of production for such works is near zero, and the supply is infinite, so the market price should be near zero. However, a while back society noticed that with such a situation there's not all that much incentive for people to produce such works, so we developed a bit of a kludge known as copyright so that easily copyable works could be treated like normal physical products. Of course, being a kludge, there are certain areas where this breaks down, this current issue being one of them. However, in these situations it's important to keep in mind what goal we should be pursuing when determining whether any additional rules should be imposed- the overall benefit of society. Basically you have to ask if any legal restrictions on second-hand sales would benefit society (in terms of significantly more works being available, reduced prices of works, etc) enough to outweigh what society would be giving up (the increased economic efficiency that comes with recirculating goods in the market as opposed to effectively destroying them). If there is potentially a net benefit to society then we can consider rules to strike the optimal balance. However, if there's no net benefit to society and such rules would only serve to increase the profits of a small group of people, well then, those folks can just fuck off.

You have your history very wrong, copyright is a recent invention, but not that recent, try 250-300 years. We have it because of the printing press and to address the concerns of that era, not our era.

Also, there must be non-monetary incentives to create software, because a lot of free stuff is made, even games.

I was going for a fairly casual tone and didn't want to get into details and specific dates. We can discuss the implementation of copyright going back to the Statute of Anne, the differences in philosophical principles between the European and US implementations (leading up to conflicts surrounding the Berne convention), and so on if you really want to, but I'm personally of the opinion that just a fairly general treatment of the subject is sufficient for this topic at this time.

Personally, I don't see a problem with buying used games. I don't do it often, but I don't believe it should be placed on the "illegal" list.

Just my humble opinion,
-Cym

Article 1, Section 8 of our Constitution is what was supposed to cover this kind thing. The industry is trying to circumvent copyright law as it was intended (to prevent theft of ideas and inventions and writings and discoveries, etc.) and instead want to use it to control that product after purchase to ensure that people are only able to buy new copies from the company, and are only allowed to use said product as the company sees fit.

The bitch of it is, there's nothing wrong with that, morally or ethically. They're not forcing anyone to do anything, and people are more than willing to play along because they have to have something shiny. All we as consumers have to do is to stop buying it until they get their heads out of their asses. There are plenty of alternatives. So both consumers and publishers can throw their hands up as they ride their roller coasters of fail.

Meanwhile, I'll enjoy GOG. :D

You know what's funny?

I buy used so I don't have to pirate.

Yeah.

Note that this is the justification for US copyright law; formalized copyright law is generally first credited to the Statute of Anne, which came into force about 80 years earlier than the US implementation. And before that there were a bunch of agreements between governments and publishers that basically were copyright used as a form of censorship (governments would only allow specific publishing companies to print books, as a means for the governments to have greater control over what was printed). Then add to that the French concept of the "right of the author" which worked its way into the Berne Convention and the whole copyright justification starts to become a bit muddled if you really get into it. So much simpler if we just remain idealistic and US-centric. ;)

Yeah, that's why I said *our* Constitution. :P

My only issue is you made it sound like copyright was "invented" when people noticed you could copy songs from Napster pretty easily. As others have pointed out, it has never been meant to protect inventors but increase the public domain, of which our government is our steward (incidentally, the US government is pretty crappy on all fronts for protecting our property, they sell billions in gold to a Canadian company for a pittance, like 6 million a year - the mineral rights belong to the public- this is just one tiny example that I could name).

Sorry if it came across that way, it wasn't my intention.

In the US and most Common Law countries this is true, but copyright in many Civil Law countries (e.g. most of Europe, sans the UK) includes what is known as "authors' rights" (droit d'auteur), which takes the view that copyright is not just there for economic reasons but also to protect authors' "moral rights" over their works, which basically is the view that a work is an extension of an author's personality and thus the author should have some degree of control over the work in perpetuity. The degree to which copyright law should recognize moral rights was actually a major point of contention when the Berne Convention was drawn up.

Now, just to be clear, I'm personally of the opinion that copyright should only be viewed as an economic institution with the sole purpose of expanding the public domain (and thus be as short as possible while still providing a reasonable economic incentive for creating works); the above is just how copyright was viewed historically in some areas.