Reselling iTunes Library is Copyright Infringement, Court Says

[admin]

A U.S. federal court has handed down a decision that affirms the notion that what you "buy" on iTunes doesn't belong to you at all.

The case was brought to the court's attention when a new start-up, ReDigi, was sued by record labels for copyright infringement. ReDigi had a new take on digital music, by allowing users to sell their pre-owned digital music collections.

ReDigi cited the First-sale Doctrine, which limits the rights of the rights holder on the copyrighted works sold to the first sale only. It is this century doctrine that allows people to sell their used items. Only two weeks ago, the U.S. Supreme Court reaffirmed the validity of the doctrine, and formally extended it to apply to foreign based works.

The record labels, represented in this case by Capitol Records, disagreed with the use of the First-sale Doctrine in the case of digital music. Capitol Records argued that what ReDigi was selling was an unauthorized copy of the music, and as such, the First-sale Doctrine did not apply.

And New York District Court Judge Richard Sullivan sided with Capitol Records. Sullivan noted the differences between digital content and physical objects such as music CDs, and said that the transfer of ownership that ReDigi allowed was simply the act of making a digital copy, regardless of whether the original files were deleted or not.

"The court cannot of its own accord condone the wholesale application of the first sale defence to the digital sphere, particularly when Congress itself has declined to take that step," Sullivan noted in his ruling.

[drfsupercenter]

I really can't stand when I hear people use the term "digital copy", whether for movies or films... A compact disc, BY DEFINITION, is a DIGITAL COPY of the music. It's plain and simple. All iTunes is is a lossy, compressed version of the CD you would buy a hard copy of.

Just like how a DIGITAL video disc or Blu-Ray is already a "digital copy" of the movie - the added extra is more or less a "portable copy" and would really be better off renamed to that.

So this doctrine is fairly stupid, as if it's legal to sell a CD, why would it not be legal to sell the same information represented differently? It's just compressed instead of in PCM.

[admin]

Physical goods can be re-sold, but purely digital goods cannot, because the argument is that there's no way to differentiate between a transfer of ownership and making a copy with pure digital content.

For a CD, for example, transfer of ownership means after you sell it, you don't have the CD anymore and you can't continue use it, and they say this is something you cannot guarantee with pure digital content, and so that's why you can't sell it.

Only problem with this argument is that it's trivial to rip the CD before you sell it, so you end up with the same situation as pure digital content.

It's also trivial to delete the iTunes tracks you're selling after you make the sale and you end up in the same situation as selling used CDs, and ReDigi had a system that ensured and automated this process, so from a practical point of view, both selling methods can end up having the same result. The court didn't really want to see it this way, unfortunately.

But the truth of the matter is that content holders want to give consumer less rights with pure digital content, and for the most part, we consumers have accepted it willingly (for example, no refunds or returns for digitally purchased games vs physical boxed games, no resale value for pure digital content vs digital content store on physical media, and losing your account on iTunes or Steam will mean you lose all your purchases).

Given that we have less rights with digital "purchases", and since the court has now ruled that digital content has no resale value, I think we should be paying much less for them!

[drfsupercenter]

Agreed. Personally, I would love to see a legal music service that let you download lossless tracks. That's really the only reason I buy CDs anymore, because iTunes and so on only give you inferior compressed versions.