I made that comparison because there were posts about buying the music once, and entitled to getting the same song, or album free for life, thats a misunderstanding.
while the legality and distribution and policing of digital content is still being revised and policed, sure, if you bought something from i-tunes, and they decide to re-release the same song at a higher quality and give their customers who originally bought it for free, thats their choice as a retailer, they originally stilted the quality of the track to begin with as a lower res file. . likewise if you bought a peice of software, and the compnay put out a free updgrade. but that doeesn't mean that if you go to the bands myspace page, and tell them you already bought the song once, that you can download it for free from there, or another online store. Its still retail.
the value is in both the IP, which outlines how and in what manner you can use the IP, protecting the rights of those who created it. for instance, you can't take a song, and drop it into your movie without paying for the right to use it, and going through the proper channells, just because you once bought the song on cd, you cannot sync it in this manner, you were given the right to listen to the music, not distrubute it in any way. and the value is in the material also, which represents one way the rightfully entitled gets to distribute their IP, and a way for retailers to make money as well. This does not mean that just anyone has the right to distrubute IP, whether in digital format or in another way. gotta run, would like to write more.
heck when in doubt, why not sway to the safe side
