Amazon has been granted a patent on a marketplace that could facilitate a secondhand digital market.  Thenew patentcould affectdigital goods, such as e-books, audio, video, computer games, and others.

“Amazon's idea is that users can sacrifice their right to access "the now-used digital content" and move it to another person's data store,” reports ZDNet.  

In some ways, the patent merely describes a digital locker, but one that permits trade and imposes scarcity on the digital goods in order to address questions around the "first sale" doctrine — a legal principle that limits the rights of copyright and trademark owners and allows protected material to be resold.