I don’t think the Lockean argument actually gets you where you want it to go.
Locke’s labor theory of property doesn’t just say creators own the fruits of their labor. It also says they have the right to alienate that property, to sell it, transfer it, or give it away. Once that transfer occurs, ownership changes hands. That’s the entire point of property rights.
This is where your comparison to theater performances breaks down.
A performance is inherently ephemeral. Of course you only buy admission. But books, paintings, sculptures, and other tangible works have been bought and sold for centuries. When Rembrandt sold a painting, he didn’t retain the right to dictate who displayed it, resold it, or inherited it. When someone bought a book, the author retained the copyright, but they didn’t retain ownership of that physical copy.
That’s the distinction your argument glosses over.
Physical media didn’t create some bizarre loophole that tricked consumers into believing they owned art. Copyright law has always separated ownership of a copy from ownership of the intellectual property. Buying a novel never meant you owned the copyright. It meant you owned that particular copy.
The “historical anomaly” argument doesn’t really hold either. Technology creating new forms of property isn’t evidence that those forms are somehow illegitimate. Printing presses, photography, automobiles, patents, and even digital storage all changed what could be owned. Calling something a historical anomaly doesn’t make it philosophically suspect.
Where your argument has merit is with services. An MMO, cloud software, or any product that depends on ongoing servers and continuous development is fundamentally different from a finished single-player game or a movie sitting on a disc. Those genuinely require ongoing labor.
But once you start arguing that creators retain moral authority over every copy they’ve sold forever, you’ve left Locke behind. You’re no longer defending property rights, you’re defending perpetual control after the sale. That’s a very different philosophical position, and I don’t think your conclusion follows from your premise.
You make a very well-articulated point regarding Locke, and the distinction between copyright and the First Sale Doctrine is spot on for traditional media. But your argument fails because it treats executable software as functionally and legally identical to a book or a painting. It isn’t.
When Rembrandt sells a painting or a publisher sells a book, you are buying a static, physical object that you consume passively. You don’t need an End User License Agreement to read a book or look at a canvas.
Software is completely different. A game isn’t a static object; it is functional code. To even play a game, your console or PC must actively copy that code from the disc into its RAM to execute it. Because running software requires continuous replication, you must have a license from the creator to do so.
This is why the application of Locke’s alienation of property doesn’t work here. The creators never alienated or transferred ownership of the software to the consumer. They sold you a physical piece of plastic (which you own and can resell), but they explicitly retained ownership of the code, granting you a revocable license to execute it.
I’m not “defending perpetual control after the sale” as some grand philosophical stance. I’m pointing it out as the objective, legal reality of how the software industry has operated for decades.
Because consumers never owned the game, only the plastic delivery mechanism and a license to play, shifting to a digital-only marketplace isn’t a theft of property rights. It’s simply the industry cutting out the plastic middleman. You can argue it’s anti-consumer to remove the secondary market for those plastic discs, but you can’t claim it’s “immoral” for creators to shift how they deliver a license you were already operating under.
I don’t think the Lockean argument actually gets you where you want it to go.
Locke’s labor theory of property doesn’t just say creators own the fruits of their labor. It also says they have the right to alienate that property, to sell it, transfer it, or give it away. Once that transfer occurs, ownership changes hands. That’s the entire point of property rights.
This is where your comparison to theater performances breaks down.
A performance is inherently ephemeral. Of course you only buy admission. But books, paintings, sculptures, and other tangible works have been bought and sold for centuries. When Rembrandt sold a painting, he didn’t retain the right to dictate who displayed it, resold it, or inherited it. When someone bought a book, the author retained the copyright, but they didn’t retain ownership of that physical copy.
That’s the distinction your argument glosses over.
Physical media didn’t create some bizarre loophole that tricked consumers into believing they owned art. Copyright law has always separated ownership of a copy from ownership of the intellectual property. Buying a novel never meant you owned the copyright. It meant you owned that particular copy.
The “historical anomaly” argument doesn’t really hold either. Technology creating new forms of property isn’t evidence that those forms are somehow illegitimate. Printing presses, photography, automobiles, patents, and even digital storage all changed what could be owned. Calling something a historical anomaly doesn’t make it philosophically suspect.
Where your argument has merit is with services. An MMO, cloud software, or any product that depends on ongoing servers and continuous development is fundamentally different from a finished single-player game or a movie sitting on a disc. Those genuinely require ongoing labor.
But once you start arguing that creators retain moral authority over every copy they’ve sold forever, you’ve left Locke behind. You’re no longer defending property rights, you’re defending perpetual control after the sale. That’s a very different philosophical position, and I don’t think your conclusion follows from your premise.
You make a very well-articulated point regarding Locke, and the distinction between copyright and the First Sale Doctrine is spot on for traditional media. But your argument fails because it treats executable software as functionally and legally identical to a book or a painting. It isn’t.
When Rembrandt sells a painting or a publisher sells a book, you are buying a static, physical object that you consume passively. You don’t need an End User License Agreement to read a book or look at a canvas.
Software is completely different. A game isn’t a static object; it is functional code. To even play a game, your console or PC must actively copy that code from the disc into its RAM to execute it. Because running software requires continuous replication, you must have a license from the creator to do so.
This is why the application of Locke’s alienation of property doesn’t work here. The creators never alienated or transferred ownership of the software to the consumer. They sold you a physical piece of plastic (which you own and can resell), but they explicitly retained ownership of the code, granting you a revocable license to execute it.
I’m not “defending perpetual control after the sale” as some grand philosophical stance. I’m pointing it out as the objective, legal reality of how the software industry has operated for decades.
Because consumers never owned the game, only the plastic delivery mechanism and a license to play, shifting to a digital-only marketplace isn’t a theft of property rights. It’s simply the industry cutting out the plastic middleman. You can argue it’s anti-consumer to remove the secondary market for those plastic discs, but you can’t claim it’s “immoral” for creators to shift how they deliver a license you were already operating under.