I was replying directly to the poster's analogy, when he said Tesla isn't obliged to go through a Ford dealer. While the first-sale doctrine isn't directly appl

I was replying directly to the poster's analogy, when he said Tesla isn't obliged to go through a Ford dealer. While the first-sale doctrine isn't directly applicable in this case because there is no direct sale and no physical good transferred into the buyer's possession, the principle should be, and we should make laws that respect that. The old adage is "possession is 9/10ths of the law". We need to think about how that applies in the digital age, when much of what we "own" is only represented by a relatively small handful of bits on a drive in a datacenter somewhere, and not in the legal owner's direct physical possession. I have season pack DVDs and I have season packs I've bought on Amazon Video (I also have over 200 games on Steam, where this issue is probably much more salient). Ideally, the medium wouldn't matter, legally speaking; what would matter is that I owned a copy of something. As it stands, I have substantially more rights with a DVD than with a bit assigned to my user profile in Amazon's database somewhere. We need to find a way to port the first-sale doctrine to the digital world, and otherwise update our arcane technology access laws. Separately but relatedly, we also need to weaken copyright protections substantially to grant a more even balance between the financial interests of the rightsholders and the cultural interests of the public at large, and to correct the economic inequities that flow from government's grant of a practically-eternal (since most copyrights that come into being today are not going to expire until most or all of us are dead), almost-unlimited (since copyrights allow the rightsholder to squash almost any use and since it requires millions of dollars to fight the media conglomerates and establish as valid just one single, isolated usage as legally fair) monopoly to the rightsholder.