Without the first-sale doctrine, you wouldn’t have libraries and you wouldn’t have Blockbuster renting out tapes and you wouldn’t have Netflix mailing DVDs. The first-sale doctrine says, simply, that once you have purchased an object you can do with that object as you please. Because first-sale doctrine was, functionally, limited by the idea that you were losing something if you gave up possession of it. But Streaming Netflix couldn’t work that way. Early in the Streaming Netflix era this was fine because there weren’t many competitors and Netflix was throwing bucketsof money at companies to get their movies on streaming.

Source: Washington Post April 22, 2023 03:43 UTC