Universal Attacks First Sale Doctrine

I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "In Universal Music Group v. Augusto, UMG is attacking the first sale doctrine. The issue concerns some promotional CDs that were mailed out, and later found their way to eBay. According to UMG, the stickers on the discs claiming that they still own the CD give them a legal right to control what the recipients do with them, and thus, UMG should be able to dictate terms. The EFF has filed an amicus brief countering that claim, saying that because they were sent by US mail, unrequested by the recipient, they are in fact gifts, no matter what the sticker claims. If UMG somehow wins this, I plan to send them CD of copyrighted expletives with a sticker informing them of the contractually required storage location. We discussed a similar issue with e-books a couple weeks ago."

Comments

Re:Copytight

[Aphex Junkie]

Spelling skills of Slashdot users get more and more crappy over time.

Re:when would they learn....

[Firethorn]

Under U.S. law, what the recipient "owns" is a plastic disc (pretty much irregardless of what data is encoded on said disc). AOL can't deter someone from selling that particular disc -- not arguing that an AOL disc would be worth anything to begin with. It is actually a good consumer protection law, preventing companies from doing things like sending "free samples" and then attempting to bill you for it.

This. Just because they send you a unsolicited demo CD, software CD, whatever, doesn't mean that you can just go violate copyright by setting up a duplication line to sell copies of the CD. They just can't go after you for the CD. Well, they can try to annoy you with letters to send it back or pay for it, but you're under no legal obligation.

Good thing, one organization sent me a video, they made returning it annoying enough that I said 'screw this, I ain't donating them any tape(that I didn't have) to return their stupid product'. They followed it up with a half dozen dunning notices - followed up by a call. I told them 'your return required tape, I didn't have any, so I threw it away. Stop bothering me, I'm not paying, I don't even have a VCR'. Note - I normally support the organization that sent me the tape, but they do get annoying at times.