Do you buy used entertainment/media?

[Alterego-X]

the suggestion that we need to alter the basic principals of trade in order to additional financially support people who if truth be told are in many cases arguably already "gouging" their own customers and bringing about their own decline because of it is...greatly misplaced.

You are missing the elephant in the living room that is piracy. The reason why game consumers care about supporting the developers, is because games are inherently not products to be traded, but acts of information being conveyed. Under the traditional principles of trade, and the traditional permission of people freely communicating, they would spread across the net freely like a new phrase spreads in the language, or a smile spreads from face to face.

We need special copyrights to simulate games being rivalous goods that's ownership can be limited, only because their creation is disproportionally harder than creating a smile or a phrase. So we need to artifically create a scarcity of them and inflate their market value 'till it meets their production costs.

Now, how does this apply to used sales?

picture an item which when created can only ever be sold once for £60

now picture the same item being sold for £60...then £40...then £20...then £10...(already we are at £130 with no additional production costs)...then a fiver...then £2 multiple times in Cash Converters...for decades...

now i ask you: which is more economically beneficial (ie makes the most money for the economy as a whole) and the most efficient use of resources (that other bit of Capitalism everyone forgets)?...

Capitalism works when it leads to creating extra value. When you are paying money for a value that you could create freely, you are just sustaining redundant systems, instead of spending the money on others that you couldn't gain freely.

If you buy a used game, you give $15 to "the economy", particularly to the used game store.

If you pirate a game, you still give $15 to the economy, because you will eventually still spend it on a pizza or something.

The only difference between the two, is that the latter funds the creation of an extra pizza, while the former's money is basically spent on a redundant system "digging holes ond filling them again" so to speak. Choosing used sales is like paying the post office for letter delivery instead of writing e-mails. You are not actually creating value, you are just denying yourself a convenience of mailing nowadays being post-scarcity, and deny it's spared costs from other fields.

Economically, there is no reason why you shouldn't just pirate all your games. The only one is if you care about the gaming industry getting shrunk, just like the postal system. Because you are saying "Yes, their products are not rivalous goods, but their cultural value's sustained existence gives me joy."

If you don't have that, yet you justify used sales but not piracy, then you are pretty much just giving the same special support to used game stores, even though they don't produce the same cultural value, they are more like the obselete post offices in the internet era, than the artists that suddenly struggle to create art.

 

[Battenberg]

I generally prefer physical copies of my entertainment media, particularly DVDs/ blu rays so this is quite an applicable topic to me. I would say maybe 15% of my films/games/CDs are preowned at the absolute most for exactly the reason in the OP.

Honestly I find media piracy very frustrating. I have a friend who pirates films incredibly regularly and it irritates me no end because he could very easily afford to have bought every single things he's pirated. It doesn't help that he complains about the state of the film industry and how they're all playing it safe with sequels and remakes even though, at least in my mind, piracy is a significant factor in this. I'm not saying buying used is morally the same as pirating but given that the consequences to the content creator are largely the same I do still find myself avoiding preowned unless there's a good reason not to.

With all that said I'm not especially wealthy so I do tend to wait until prices go down a fair bit so I suppose I'm still not giving each content creator the full amount. Although I feel more justified in this choice than piracy because it allows to buy more, meaning the industry as a whole still gets a fair chunk of my cash, albeit split into smaller chunks for each film.

 

[CpT_x_Killsteal]

If the quality is assured and the item in question isn't that important, then yes. If you buy something, you're at liberty to sell it and keep the profit (except taxes etc,), people buying from you shouldn't feel guilty.

The world doesn't revolve around content creators.