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RIAA Doesn't Like the "Used Digital Music" Business
An anonymous reader writes "Ars Technica reports on the developing story between the RIAA and music reseller ReDigi, 'the world's first online marketplace for used digital music,' who first came online with a beta offering on October 11th, 'allowing users to sell "legally acquired digital music files" and buy them from others "at a fraction of the price currently available on iTunes.'' If the notion of selling 'used' digital content is challenged in court, we may finally receive a judicial ruling on the legality of EULAs that will overturn the previous Vernor v. Autodesk decision."
Backup copies, you're just trading files with moneys attached. Like reselling a physical CD after ripping it or copying it to tape or whatnot, same as we've done for years really, just quicker and easier. This kind of resale relies heavily on the honor system.
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Now the RIAA has flip-flopped by acting as if these digital files are NOT equivalent to physical items...I guess their position will be where the money is, regardless of what's logical or their prior actions.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
They've already been trying to do this.
In the PC games market, tying games to Steam - I bought Portal 2, and discovered it required me to install Steam to get the install and get the fucking software to run.
What does this mean? Well, I can make it run. But I can't, when done with it, give the copy (serial and all, uninstalled from my computer) to a family member or friend as a gift.
iTunes does much the same thing. You can't buy something and then send it to someone else, in a "deleted from your account, credited to theirs instead" transaction.
The cartels salivate at killing the used market because they think it means more sales.
I don't see how "used digital music" actually means anything. There's no way to stop a user from retaining a copy of the file without yet *another* level of some nasty DRM. Anyhow, the idea of "used data" is pretty ridiculous. I predict that the RIAA takes this company to court for enabling and encouraging "unauthorized redistribution of copyrighted IP" or some such. The pusher doesn't like it when you find another source...
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
Lots of considerations should go into this. What happens when someone passes away, does their mutli-thousand dollar music collection somehow become magically worthless? What about someone going through a divorce or a bankruptcy? Can these be considered assets and taken from one person and granted to another?
The first sale doctrine needs to apply in common sense situations like this. If you buy something, including a license, it is only common sense that you would be able to resell it. That being said if a license is sold the original terms should also be accepted. I'm not advocating simply sharing it, I'm talking about removing it from one place putting it in another.
People would never tolerate the loss of first sale doctrine in any other aspect of their life as it would be absurd. Can you imagine toyota demanding a transfer fee or the right of first refusal when you want to sell your car?
I wish there were such a thing as used digital goods. If only someone would have thought of a way to make that work...I don't know maybe a major game retailer with their own digital distribution site/application. I don't get what the big deal is. DRM has made enough people sick of buying music, and when they do buy their "license" to the music, they can't do anything with it. People that pirate can do anything they want with their music. Wonder who's winning this fight. My solution to the problem is stop buying music. Listen to the radio, Pandora, iHeartRadio, Tunein, or whatever free service you can find. Don't buy their product and let them wallow in their own misery and try to win us back by providing a product that people actually want in a form they can use it in.
I'm sure he'll be standing up to the RIAA any minute now....
gonna be soon.....
he's probably on his way....
just be patient.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Either intellectual property is a physical good that can be legally acquired, owned, and resold as a used item, or it is not, in which case stop fucking calling it theft.
The main issue is that people don't actually own the music they purchase, they own a licence to the music and the licence is flagged non transferrable. That is why I believe the first step is for a country to precisely describe in law what digital property is and also through some means encourage its adoption in a fair and universal fashion.
No. The hint is in the name: copyright, i.e. the (exclusive) right to make copies of a work. The copyright owner has the right to make copies. When you buy a CD, you may get (either implicitly or explicitly, depending on your jurisdiction) the right to make a single backup copy and the right to copy portions of it into the memory of a playback device as required to listen to it, but you don't get the right to make arbitrary copies. Whether you sell the copy or give it away makes no difference. When you buy a track online, a copy is created, but by someone who is authorised by the copyright holder to make copies.
It's going to be an interesting legal case because (practically) every 'move' operation on a computer is really a copy-and-delete-the-original operation, so the idea of selling the original doesn't really make sense because the original was an ephemeral copy in your network stack - the version on your hard disk is a copy of that, the version on your media player or on a backup disk is a copy of the copy.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
What happens when someone passes away, does their mutli-thousand dollar music collection somehow become magically worthless?
I always thought that it would be instructive for someone to stand in front of congress, hold up an MP3 player or phone and say, "There are 30,000 songs on this device. The Recording Industry insists that every one of those songs is worth at least a dollar. I have a great deal here for some lucky congressperson today - who wants to buy $30,000 worth of music for just five hunnert dollah?
"Do I have any takers?"
XKCD:Xeric Knowledge Comically Dispen
That is not my problem. If the business model they have set up is not technically and realistically workable then come up with another model. Part of that new model will ahve to accept that the value of a digitial music license for which I have no transfer rights is then much less than the value of a physical music license which i can transfer via selling the phsyical storage medium.
That is the real crux of this whole issue and one of the many reasons the ??AA like to play both sides of the fence. It prevents them having to address head on the loss of value inherent in a non-transferable license. The same goes for e-books BTW.
I have no trouble with non-transferable licenses, but don't try to charge me the same price for it.
If you can't be good, be good at it!
It's going to be an interesting legal case because (practically) every 'move' operation on a computer is really a copy-and-delete-the-original operation
So you're saying when I defragment my hard drive, I'm violating copyright for any music file that's partially (or wholly) moved during the defrag? And here I thought I was doing a pretty decent job of playing by the rules.
I see, so what we need is a "copyright bit" for each byte in memory. For each MOV operation, the copyright bit needs to be checked, then authorized by a copyright server. Performance might take a hit, but it's a small price to pay for making sure our computers are following the law!
from: [ace37]
to: webmaster@google.com
date: Tue, Nov 15, 2011 at 13:38
subject: Digital media and IP Law
--
Dear Google,
Please buy the RIAA and reinvent digital media in a more sane, fair,
and rational fashion.
Thanks,
John
I hearby transfer all rights physical, digital, and ethereal for the term "The Representative Party", to a group that can get elected as "The Representative Party"
Here's how it would work. A figurehead would be nominated and if elected, would contractually agree to vote the way the People want. Electronic voting would be used to transmit the will of the people to the figurehead. Voting may or may not be secret ballot. (TBD)
Question. Would the "People" be defined as any voter, or just the registered members of the Representative Party? Would regular voting rules apply, or could someone underage register to be a member and be counted, agreeing to vote for the party when of age?
I like it.
All ideas^H^H^H^H^Hprocesses in this post are Patent Pending. (as well as the process of patenting all postings)
So what if it's legal in your country to rip a CD? This is the Internet, legality is a matter of which country you and/or the buyer reside in at that moment, not what country the RIAA or the medium used to do the trade in is based in. Or is it? This is too hairy to give absolute answers on, because there are way too many situations in which exemptions to one or the other jurisdiction will apply.
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
The problem being that you *can't* really even pretend to 'give away' digital content without DRM.
I agree. But given that I have already agreed to DRM in many cases (e.g. Steam), allowing resale/lending would at least give me some benefits to offset the costs of DRM.
In Capital vs. Thomas, the verdict was for $2,250 per song. So your 30,000 MP3 player/phone would be worth $30,000 if the songs were legitimate and $67.5 million if they were pirated. That makes the $500 sale price even better. It'd be 99.999% off!
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
Latest entertainment industry power grab ... ... ...
Slashdot: "Down with the stupid evil corrupt entertainment industry!! Dirty lying evil bastards!!"
They're making a "Dr. Who" feature film
Slashdot: "Oooooh - shiny!!"
[Insert pithy quote here]
Why couldn't we treat music like we do cars. Car ownership doesn't official change until the deed changes hands. Digital content could be sold with a second file that is signed by a digital deed authority. It is also possible that the deed data could be tacked onto the last N bytes of the digital file. The digital content could be played, cut, mixed, or otherwise legally used without DRM. If you want to legally sell your collection, you transfer the deed through a digital deed authority to another user. The digital deed authority could take a few cents to a nickel per digital content in order to cover costs. The best part about this is that if you wanted to get your digital content in another physical format, you already paid for the license and businesses could just charge a conversion cost. For example, if you purchase a game on your computer, why should you have to pay the full retail cost to get it on the Xbox 360 when you already paid for a vast majority of the cost. I would much rather pay $5.00 to get my game on a different platform than $60.00.
The copyright owner has the right to make copies.
This is correct, but it's about the last place you are.
When you buy a CD, you may get (either implicitly or explicitly, depending on your jurisdiction) the right to make a single backup copy and the right to copy portions of it into the memory of a playback device as required to listen to it, but you don't get the right to make arbitrary copies.
First, I'm speaking about the US unless otherwise stated, as I know that law best.
That said, there is nothing in copyright law that says you are allowed to make backup copies of audio recordings...only software has this right. But, you do have the right to make as many copies as you want of any copyrighted material as long as you don't distribute them. So, like you could make 1000 copies of the latest Harry Potter book and store them in your basement, you can also make as many copies of a song or video as you want, as long as there is no distribution of those copies (this is not true in the UK, where format-shifting is not legal). These copies are not "backups" in the legal sense. A backup for software can be used as a replacement for the original media if the original media is destroyed, but if you lose possession (either through destruction or transfer) of the original of a book or CD, technically you have to destroy all the copies. For software backup, you only have to destroy it if you transfer possession of the original copy to another entity.
Second, most of the "copies" you speak of (on the network, in the player memory) are not copies according to copyright law. Copies must be "fixed in a medium". For downloaded songs, it's pretty easy to see that the medium is the original destination hard drive, but it really doesn't matter, as all of these are "private", anyway.
So, you can make arbitrary copies of a song purchased from ITMS...you just can't distribute them. Now, ITMS does offer an extra feature of helping you make some of those copies, but they limit that help to 4 other devices under your control. Just because they chose the arbitrary limit of 4 copies beyond the original does not mean that has any force in copyright law..
They have a workable business model in which they do not allow you to resell your music. You are trying to get them to come up with a business model that suits your purposes and asking them to find ways to cater to your whims. You are the one who needs to come up with a workable business model. As far as we can see, allowing people to resell music violates copyright, because you do not have the right to create new copies to sell. Reselling digital music necessarily involves creating new copies of the media. So you need to first find a way around that for your business model to begin to be workable.
That wasn't the value for the music, that was the lost sales due to uploading. Physically stealing something, you have to pay restitution for not buying it. Uploading, you have to pay restitution for everyone else for not buying it.
The original example would probably draw questions such as, how did you acquire $30,000 worth of music legally? If you ripped it from CDs then it's not yours to sell, without supplying the original discs. If you downloaded them individually and paid 0.99 per track, then you spent about $30,000 and I would like the IRS to check where you got that money from.
I've actually talked to a copyright lawyer who said with a straight face that every router between me and someone I send a copyright-laden file to is guilty of violating the "mechanical copyright" of the rights owner. The settled case law on the matter revolves around radio stations making mix tapes in preparation for broadcast; the stations pay for a license to do so, and the idea of a transient mechanical copy needed for replay is held to be identical to the copying of a .mp3 file into memory as part of replay on a computer. The RIAA has decided that they're not going to try to prosecute any listener for the copy made in RAM or on the processor, although those are violations by the letter of the law as well.
"Space Exploration is not endless circles in low earth orbit." -Buzz Aldrin
118 != "almost 150". That's even if you're only talking about the original song "Good Morning to All".
The copyright was registered in 1935, 76 years ago.
To be fair, 118 is relatively close to 150. The song may have been copyrighted in 1935... but it was composed much earlier and children were spontaneously singing it for birthdays, even adding the lyrics "happy birthday to you"
The fact that you can actually copyright a song that is >ALMOST 50 years old, authored by someone else is actually even more apalling
Never antropomorphize computers, they do not like that
The fact that you can actually copyright a song that is >ALMOST 50 years old, authored by someone else is actually even more apalling
Right, but nothing can be done about that anymore. The good news is that it doesn't matter, because we can retroactively reduce copyright term (and all related rights) to 20 years, and those problems will be over.
This will be called Bastille Day, where the public storms the Great Wall of Copyright, behind which nearly all commercialy released sound recordings are hidden (there is an inner wall, which contains and protects the works from the last 20 years, and we'll all be glad to help to make sure no commercial users try to sneak works from behind this inner wall without proper payment).
When the copyright term is "forever minus a day", live every day like it's the last.