The Digital Death of Copyright's First Sale Doctrine

"The first sale doctrine is the provision in copyright law that gives the purchaser of a copy of a copyrighted work the right to sell or otherwise dispose of that copy without the permission of the copyright owner. If there were no first sale doctrine, there would be no free market for used books, CDs, or DVDs, because the copyright owner's right of distribution would reach beyond the first sale, all the way down the stream of commerce. Without the first sale doctrine, movie rental services like Netflix and Redbox wouldn't be able to lend DVDs without authorization from studios, and you wouldn't be able to lend the bestseller you just finished to a friend without authorization from the book's author or publisher....As the transition from physical to streaming or cloud-based digital distribution continues, further divorcing copyrighted works from their traditional tangible embodiments, it will increasingly be the case that consumers do not own the information goods they buy (or, rather, think they've bought). Under the court's decision in [Vernor v. Autodesk], all a copyright owner has to do to effectively repeal the statutory first sale doctrine is draft a EULA that (1) specifies that the user is granted a license; (2) significantly restricts the user's ability to transfer the software; and (3) imposes notable use restrictions. Sad to say, it's about as easy as falling off a log...."