Bitcoin: A model for digital ownership

Bitcoin has created a way for people to "own" digital currency.  Someone can transfer "ownership" from one person to another.  Although designed for digital currency, but it occurred to me that this model can work with other digital entities.  Specifically, this could be used to track the second hand market of digital copyrighted material.

Currently, you can't actually buy digital material.  I am going to start using different words to describe the "sale" of digital goods to more accurately portray the economics because of this fact.  When you "buy" an e-book on Amazon, you are actually renting the e-book.  There is a renter's agreement between you, Amazon and the copyright owner that dictates what you can do with the e-book.  Depending on renting agreement for that book, you cannot lend that book out to a friend or family member.  Amazon can even forcibly terminate the renter's agreement and remotely delete the e-book off of your Kindle.  Amazon is starting to research the sale of the renter's agreement to someone else, however.  Sinse this partial sale of a rented good is still controlled by Amazon, you should not expect that market to operate as a real second hand market.  That market will be so heavily regulated, that it will be more like communism then like capitalism (just like the current e-book market).

If e-books, as well as other digital products, were made available in a Bitcoin-like market, then the second hand market would operate like a supply and demand economy.  The supply would be limited by the number of people that were willing to pay the artificially inflated prices for the first sale of the e-books.  The demand is driven by the people who didn't want to pay full price for the book.  After the person read the book, they would be able to put the book for sale on a second hand market of their choosing.  Bitcoin provides the tracking mechanism that forces the digital property to only have a single owner at all times.  The rules of a supply and demand free market economy dictate the price of the second hand market (the one guaranteed to us by the US Constitution).

This model would give us back the First-sale Doctrine that has been slowly disappearing.  With the reintroduction of the second hand market, first sale prices can finally start to come down.  The first sale prices could start to follow the rules of a free market.  If a person had the choice between a first-sale at $20 or a second-sale at $10, that person is going to choose the $10 second-sale.  In order to compete (the golden word in a free market economy), the copyright holder would have to lower the price of the first-sale.  Alternatively, there is a limited supply of the second-sale, so if too many people purchased the second-sale e-books, then the price would go up.  Eventually, the first and second sales should reach equilibrium.  We call this Capitalism!