Market for used games may not disappear with physical media
Used copies of digital goods could soon get a market on Apple and Amazon, suggest patents filed by the companies.
While many have looked to the rise of digital sales as the death-knell of the used games market, the demise of physical media may not be enough to finish off pre-owned sales.
The patents, found by Mashable, both describe systems that would allow customers a way of selling or trading digital goods.
The biggest difference is that Apple's system gives developers and publishers a cut of the profit.
"A portion of the proceeds of the "resale" may be paid to the creator or publisher of the digital content item and/or the entity that originally sold the digital content item to the original owner," reads the Apple patent.
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This may be a preemptive move on the part of both companies to comply with a European law that demands that goods sold digitally be able to be resold by the purchaser.
The US has a Supreme Court decision that could be applied to the same effect, which stipulates that publishers lose control of an item after its first sale.
The European case you're talking about doesn't demand that digital goods must be able to be resold. It says that software (and only software) can be resold without infringing the copyright owner's distribution right BUT software developers are still allowed to use DRM. Quite different to the position suggested in the article.
