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Reselling ski lift ticket theft?


aleles

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Hey everyone,

 

I saw an interesting topic about the moral aspect of sneaking into a second movie with just one ticket

https://board.freedomainradio.com/topic/42843-moral-sneaking-into-a-second-movie-with-just-one-ticket/

 

It made me think about a scenario with reselling ski lift tickets. For example, if you purchase a 4 hour lift ticket from someone who skied for 2 hours and then you ski for the remaining 2 hours, is this theft? What if they give you this ticket for free? The ticket says it's not transferable. There are some places that managed to make it illegal to resell tickets.

 

We could say that there is an explicit contract that prohibits transferring a ticket. However, if, for example, Apple says that iphone reselling is prohibited and people can only buy a new iphone, would this be much different?

 

Thanks,

Alex

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The ethics of the situation are made in the explicit contract prior to purchasing. Since the ski ticket says that it's not transferrable. The company is able to confiscate that ticket when it discovers you transferred ownership. There is no such contractual obligation on the purchase of an Iphone, so the original purchaser can transfer ownership of the phone to whomever they wish.

 

I remember reading somewhere where certain people were compalining why they couldn't re-sell their Kindle books like normal paperbound books. Again, Amazon are explicit about their Kindle books not being transferrable to other accounts from the moment you purchase them.

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When you buy something you can make any use of it the way you like. If you can't, you did not buy it but rather lease it. 

 

Well that is the explicit contract. Leasing is just a more explicit term that is used for certain kinds of products or services. There is also a limit on the amount of time you can lease a product. Whereas a Kindle book you get to keep for a lifetime. That said, you can still share your Kindle of course. Which as far as I know is not something Amazon explicitly states you cannot do.

 

The only ethical consideration you have to take, as with all contracts. Is once you agree to the terms of purchase, you can't then complain if they remove your right to use their product or service if you break that agreement.

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(Regarding the Kindle example) This is same rub that Valve perpetrated on the video game industry over a decade ago. They offer the convenience of digital distribution of games online, but you can't resell after you've finished with them. Personally, I'd rather be able to resell the game and recoup half of my money than have the convenience of automatic updates.

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Both Amazon and Valve did seek out ways to share and lend your library with others to offset the inconvenience of losing the ability to resell. They also offset this inconvenience with (sometimes only slightly) lower prices for digital content than physical.

 

I'm gonna borrow the idea from Stef and say there's no solution, only different approaches with different costs and benefits.

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The only ethical consideration you have to take, as with all contracts. Is once you agree to the terms of purchase, you can't then complain if they remove your right to use their product or service if you break that agreement.

 

Well this presupposes that you make a purchase of a product when buying something from Amazon. However, this is an illusion. When you 'buy' a book, you don't 'purchase' it, rather you get a license that can be revoked at any time. 

 

E-book sellers like Amazon, Google, and Apple make this clear in their terms and conditions—"Kindle Content is licensed, not sold, to you by the Content Provider"—but continue to perpetuate the false idea of ownership by using words like “purchase,” “buy,” and “bookstore” to give the sense that it’s just like a transaction you have in a brick-and-mortar shop, only a digital version.

 

http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/do-you-ever-own-your-e-books

 

Lets imagine I sell you a hammer under the condition that I can take it away any time I want and that you may not give it to your neighbour. This is ludicrous, but exactly reflects what Amazon, Google, and Apple do. While a hardware cannot get away with it, media corporations have enough pull to legalize their actions. 

 

You have two options. Either, you don't purchase these products or you buy them and treat them as your property. That is you remove malicious software or parts of the software that impedes with its use. 

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Lets imagine I sell you a hammer under the condition that I can take it away any time I want and that you may not give it to your neighbour. This is ludicrous, but exactly reflects what Amazon, Google, and Apple do.

 

They could do it, but they have competitors that will offer conditions you expect... and they'll lose business. If they instead sold you a hammer for half the cost, on condition that you only use it or return it to them, some people might go for it.

 

But think about it this way. Craftsman used to have a lifetime warranty. Now they don't except for select items. In fact, it's hard to find items with a lifetime warranty at the price Craftsman sells at.

 

Again, there are no solutions, just costs and benefits.

 

It's not ludicrous. It's how they can afford to sell things at that price and make a reasonable profit. If people didn't like it, they wouldn't pay for it. People think they are getting something that's worth more to them than the money they are spending. Don't knock it, just vote with your dollar.

 

Let me add that I buy e-books from O'Reilly and I can't transfer them either, but they give me all the useful file formats and it's DRM free. I like that. I pay for that because I like it.

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Exactly. People have a misconception. They think they purchase a product while they don't. And when they realize that, they are shocked. 

 

Your judgement of the value is subjective. So is theirs. But it's better than some dictator setting the value for everything, don't you think? What *we* want is that people pay what *they* want for what they want. If their expectations are wrong, we are free to inform them. But I never expected to share my ebooks with anyone else except my family, and what do you know? Amazon, and O'Reilly, and Pragmatic Programming Press let me do that.

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