Originally Posted by ScandalUMD

The copyright stuff has to do with selling copies. This notion that you are purchasing a license exists nowhere in the law. It may be illegal to copy a CD and sell the copies, but the CD itself is a good that you purchased and may transfer.

In the history of music and film on recorded media, there has never been any serious suggestion I'm aware of that a secondhand market in recordings has any copyright implications whatsoever. The music industry is a special interest, and, like all special interests, it is able to get the legislation it wants when the impact on everyone else is minimal. But the impact of shutting down all the secondhand record, movie and game retailers would certainly draw public ire.

If the market permits it, they might try to hard-code something into the software that stops it from being transferrable, but that would probably upset a lot of people, and would be bad for the console advancing it in competition.

As for online distribution, discs are still a lot cheaper per-gigabyte than hard-drive space, and digital distribution for games that take up 50-60 megabytes and get downloaded a few hundred thousand times is a lot less complicated than digital distribution of games that take up 5-6 gigabytes and get downloaded a couple of million times.

Originally Posted by sniper308

I was more referring to the coming time when games will be downloaded instead of buying a disc. And then much like downloaded ebooks they won't be transferable on the second hand market like used hardcopy books, etc.