There is a strong argument that the first sale doctrine should be applied to the license granting the use of digital goods rather than the actual copy (which is undecipherable in its physical form to us anyway and require a lot of additional copying within a computer to produce the pulses of light that we can read, for example). The license is the meaningful legal construct in which the content is accessed.

The EU has already done this since the ECJ ruling in 2012, and the US is behind the curve.

I'll agree that your interpretation is the correct one if everything is taken completely literally.

That being said, it seems like the ultimate end run around otherwise well established law surrounding books. As you noted essentially all software works in this way. Throwing out all established laws and end user rights "because digital" hardly seems reasonable to me.

How does such a line of argument square with the fact that even making personal use of a digital item inevitably involves multiple copy operations on a local device in the best case? Even moving it between two partitions on the same device involves copying it. (I suppose I should just be grateful that the digital overlords saw fit to grant me permission to move things between logical volumes. /s)

> How does such a line of argument square with the fact that even making personal use of a digital item inevitably involves multiple copy operations on a local device in the best case? Even moving it between two partitions on the same device involves copying it.

Most digital goods are "sold" as a copyright license.