Apple Responds To iTunes "First Sale" Question

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Apple Responds To iTunes "First Sale" Question

Posted by timothy on Monday September 8, 2003 @02:32PM from the are-the-hoops-worth-the-jumping dept.

atallah writes "It looks like Apple has come out and explained its position on resale of songs. It is interesting that they didn't flat-out reject the idea. Check out this Business Week article."

2 of 323 comments (clear)

Min score:

Reason:

Sort:

Re:Much agreed with Apple by grahamm · 2003-09-08 19:22 · Score: 3, Informative

So maybe what is needed is a statute which makes it mandatory for all DRM systems to allow the purchaser to exercise their first sale rights and transfer the rights to someone else. Though I suppose that there is much chance of this happening as a snowstorm in hades.
Re:Much agreed with Apple by NetworkImpossible · 2003-09-09 00:39 · Score: 3, Informative

Good points. And Apple pays the labels $0.65 per song, and gets $0.99. They have to do what they do in the $0.34 that's left -- develop the software, run the servers, negotiate with the oily lawyers for the labels, pay for the bandwidth.
They still have a way to go on the store yet, even for Mac users. Last night I tried to buy some Warren Zevon (RIP) and all they had was one album, and several partial albums. The annoying "partial album" results from the patchwork of rights -- they have permission for this and not for that. And you can forget about foreign material (I lived in Germany for years, and have favourite bands, whose stuff is probably on file-sharing but ain't here), and you can forget about small-time performers on indie labels.
If the RIAA members had been willing to attach a $0.99 download charge to Napster (which would have been possible) and distribute it on either a direct or a performing rights society type weighted basis, they would have made so much money. The irony is that their greed and determination to wring every farthing out of the consumer has blinded them to immense piles of dollars, begging to be picked up by whoever is first to the clue. When the class action lawyers figure this out -- which will take a while -- expect to see a bunch of class actions on behalf of the stockholders.