Here’s my answer, which I also made over at PV:

Let me be realistic for a second before I get all ivory tower.If you offer people a way to get money from their digital content, you create a community that has an incentive to pirate where they never did before. This is bad stuff. If piracy is easy to rationalize now, imagine when people can tell themselves, “I did pay for it, I just want to get a little money back. It doesn’t affect the writer. They already got my money. There’s no victim.” This will devastate creators in a way that modern piracy has no ability to do.Now, speaking idealistically. For the “used” book buyer, there is zero difference between the “used” digital product and a “new” one. There is no reason to buy new at all, in fact. It’s not like a paperback, which might be creased, torn, stained, wrinkled, chewed, etc. Buying a “used” digital product is like being handed a brand new paperback for a tiny fraction of the “new” price. So, why would you ever buy a “new” digital product if a “used” one was available?Here’s the key point: if Amazon or anyone else is selling a digital book “used,” they are selling an identical product to what the author sells, except they are not paying the author. Worse, digital products will never degrade, meaning that they can be resold indefinitely, with the everywhereness of the internet making them easy to find instantly and effortlessly.This is not at all the same as buying used paperbacks at a used book store. Buying used paperbacks has built-in limits; you have to invest time in traveling to the book to buy it or wait for it to be shipped to you, plus you have to locate the physical book in a physical store near you or wait for an online retailer to get the physical book processed so it appears on their website. This is very much the opposite of how digital books work.About the “zeroes and ones.” In a strictly physical sense, no, an ebook is nothing more than an arrangement of zeroes and ones. It’s more complicated than that, though. The zeroes and ones are actually the customer’s; they’re paying to have their switches flipped into a certain arrangement. In other words, “selling” an ebook involves no transfer of physical property whatsoever. It is purely abstract.When you buy a paper book, you have a right to the paper and ink because it is physical property. You have no rights to the intellectual property. When you resell a paper book, you are selling physical property, which is part of property rights. When reselling an ebook, there is no physical property to exchange. So what are you selling? Access rights, copyright, etc are not physical property, and so you can’t say that it’s the same as selling a paperback. It just isn’t, either logically or legally.As for the customer benefit of resale, this is something addressed more appropriately by competitive pricing. If I sell my ebook for $2.99 with no resale, my customers are a lot better off than if I had to sell it at $8.99 so I can recoup my losses against resale.Your idea about cutting the author in on a % of resale sounds more fair. However, this is basically exactly the same as forcing authors to accept discounting. The only difference would be what you called it.KLL and all libraries are a different matter, and I don’t take issue with those. Libraries don’t transfer ownership.Quick conclusion: paper book resale is based on property rights. Ebooks don’t exist as physical property, so their resale is legally not the same as with paper books. Ebooks also behave very differently from paper books, so logically their resale is not the same either. I think that good pricing is the better answer.

Obviously Paul is a Very Bad Person who wants Total Anarchy to rule the world. Nah, he just has a different perspective on what constitutes property and what constitutes a sale. ‘Tis a weighty matter the politicians are sure to foul up by siding with their lobbyists.