Ans In the US, it's covered by "first sale" rights--yes, you have the right to resell books and other copyrighted material you've purchased. You don't have the right to make copies of them to sell them. So an Amazon Kindle could be sold with the books originally downloaded to it; a memory chip full of downloads of DRM'd ebooks could be sold, and so on.

The fact that selling these ebooks wouldn't necessarily give up the extra copies you made, hasn't been tested in court.

Most ebook sellers declare that they're only "licensed" to the original purchaser. Similar "licensing" attempts haven't held up in court, but ebooks haven't directly been tested. (Software has, and it's been decided that you can resell your boxed software on eBay.)

The concept of "it's a license, not a purchase" only works if it's treated like a license... if you have to return it under certain conditions, or if you make continuing payments, or something like that. The courts have ruled that a seller's label of "license not purchase" is meaningless.

Ebook distributors really try to push a model of "one purchase, one human reader." This model isn't supported by the laws that govern purchases, so they're trying to stretch copyright law in that direction. It almost works, but there are loopholes. It's also not supported by the history of literature, in which book sharing is a key aspect of book appreciation; they're working against hundreds of years of reading culture.

I have no idea what German copyright or resale rights laws might apply. from http://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=49848