First sale doctrine definitely used to apply to software. Back when software came in shrink-wrapped boxes.
And alas and woe that the tech industry and courts have conspired to build such a sad world where essentially criminal violation of business model rules. That we haven't rights, when software has any services or systems it connects to.
I deeply appreciated a shout-out from Web scraping for me but not for thee to Mark Lemley in early aughts I guess, pointing out that the biggest trick the tech world ever played was switching from being governed via property rights (where established consumer rights like transferability apply), to contract rights, where the person making or selling something can ensnare you however they please & you get no say & no rights. Software has been a mass tool for infernalizarion of this world & this forever worsening of conditions needs to be pushed back against, needs some force to oppose it's ever widening sway. https://blog.ericgoldman.org/archives/2023/08/web-scraping-f...
While the First Sale Doctrine applies in principle to software, in practice nowadays it's very difficult to exercise that right. A lot of it is subscription-based, and reselling your subscription is pointless. Other stuff is DRM-encumbered, and/or tied to an online account in some form, so you can't really resell it successfully, at least not without breaking the DRM, which is in violation of a different law. And the manufacturer would claim that you've licensed the software, not actually bought it, anyway.
Resellers do something of value. They purchase a thing and hold it for some time protecting it from being snatched of the market and make it available to rich purchaser after that time who might otherwise have trouble of obtaining the item at that time.
They provide service for the rich at the expense of the poor. Which is probably not very nice but half of the capitalism works on that premise.
Ah yes. All those heroes scalping Xboxes, PS5s, Switches, GPUs, and event tickets for the last few years deserve a statue or holiday to honour their tireless commitment to improving society.
Without their botting, buying out inventories, and order limit evasion, someone who’s not wealthy might be able to enjoy the latest in entertainment or buy gifts for their children. Can you imagine?
To whom? The only one who benefits is the scalper.
The original seller is perfectly capable of doing price discovery on their own; the fact that they've decided to sell below market price is their prerogative.
It is their prerogative and I certainly wouldn't support any law saying that tickets or consoles must be sold for X price.
It is also the prerogative of others to want to pay more to secure their chance of getting that item rather than only have a chance to get it, and the prerogative of others to earn money providing that service.
The original seller is only one stakeholder in the process and I don't have a reason to hold their wants above anyone else's.
People work to make money so they can buy goods and services, which are made by other people who are working so that they can buy goods and services. That's the foundation of I think every economy on the planet with the exception of maybe North Korea, not really sure what's going on over there. Different jobs paying different incomes then acts as a bounty to draw people to do things they otherwise wouldn't and that there aren't many people willing or able to do. Higher pay lures people to spend longer in school, to go work somewhere terrible to live, to sit in a cube all day, which then benefits us all in the form of more consoles and tickets to buy.
Removing pricing as a way to determine who gets scarce goods and replacing it with random chance undermines this. Why spend the extra years in school to be a nurse instead of a wards man? Why spend the extra years to be a doctor instead of a nurse? Why spend the extra years to specialise instead of being a general practitioner?
And that's just replacing it with random chance. Replacing it with a system where what you get depends on your ability to be available the minute something is released, or to line up for hours, or to drive from store to store, is far worse. It now doesn't mean what you get is detached from how much you participate in the workforce, it means working a lot, or at something hard or important actually decreases your change of getting a playstation or Taylor Swift tickets.
Then separately there's also people liking things to different degrees and the determination of who gets which. If we both earn about the same about, you're a massive Taylor Swift fan, I think she's pretty good but nowhere near as good as Crash Bandicoot, and you don't mind playing a game every now and then; then in a world where we're both in the market for some entertainment and there's one Taylor Swift ticket and one PS5 available, you should get the ticket and I should get the PS5. If those are distributed by price, that's very likely to happen. We're both likely to be willing to outbid each other for our preferred item and be happy with the result. If it's determined by "log in at release and hope for the best" then there's only a 1/4 chance that's the outcome. Its more likely to be one of; I get both, you get both, or we each get our less preferred item.
So on one level that's why I'm in favour of people taking things distributed by chance and distribute them by price instead. However I don't think anything I just wrote would teach any reader who has been through high school anything. I don't think it will cause any revelation. I think most people would agree with me for most other goods and services. Hell there are many (majority?) of straight up socialists who want to use income and price to allocate who gets what, they just don't want to leave the income and price determination up to the market or let you use that income to purchase means of production.
Which means the question is "why do I feel the same way about tickets and consoles that I do about basically everything else that is bought and sold; when many internet commenters don't?" and I think the best answer is that I did not grow up middle class and I do not have middle class sensibilities. People who can spend $300 or $1300 on a concert ticket are both decently well off as far as I'm concerned whereas I think many of you can put yourselves in the shoes of the former and see the latter as rich. I have no strong conviction that recently released consoles and brand name artists should be attainable. I don't think anyone from my family or my childhood has been to a concert by a big enough name that tickets were scalped. I don't think not being able to buy your kid a PS5 is some sort of moral failing of society.
All of this is not to say I don't want the middle class to have the things they want. Again I think allocation by pricing leads to more people in general getting more things they want in general. But it means I lack the emotional impulse to think "market efficiency be damned, we need to do something about this!" on the topic of consoles and tickets like I would otherwise have for homelessness, people working multiple jobs to stay afloat, etc.
Edit: also resellers are a plague. That do nothing but buy up supply and double the price.