this post was submitted on 01 Feb 2024
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The legalese in the US (which might as well be everywhere as you need to have compatible copyright with the US to have a trade deal with the US, and your country is in trouble if it doesn't have a trade deal with the US) is basically that:
I'm sure plenty of publishers would love for the second set of rules to apply to things like books, and from a quick googling, it seems like occasionally academic textbooks have included a licence agreement instead of you actually owning the physical book, but I imagine that most publishers are concerned about bad PR from attempting this with a hit novel and also don't want to be accused of fraud for having their not-a-book-just-a-licence on the shelf next to regular books and thereby tricking consumers into thinking they were buying a regular book. EA attempted to double-dip over a decade ago with Battlefield 3, which included a copy of the game (with regular First Sale Doctrine rights) and a licence key for the online pass (which wasn't transferrable) and got bad press because of it. Newer PC games often come as a key in a box with no disk or a disk that only runs a web installer, so you've not got a copy of the game to claim you've bought and obviously only have a licence, and this seems to have caused less upset. This wouldn't work with a book, though, as you have to fill in the pages at the printing factory, and can't magically do it only after the user's got it home.
Just a small point on the first comment (and I wish I could find the article to refer to, but the internet is a giant void that buries things faster than a mudslide). There was a case where a game developer sued, and I believe won, against a homeowner who was selling one of their games at a garage sale because, even though they had the physical media, the EULA explicitly revoked transferral of possession and was, in fact, just a license, not ownership. I remember it vividly because it was the first time I had ever heard of someone claiming that someone did not own a physical object that they purchased in a store. Afterward, I discussed it with some of the used game retailers and found out that there were some games that they were specifically prohibited from accepting as trades for this very reason.