Slashdot Mirror
ReDigi Defends Used Digital Music Market
NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "ReDigi has fired back, opposing Capitol Records's motion for a preliminary injunction. In his opposition declaration, ReDigi's CTO Larry Rudolph explains in detail (PDF) how the technology employed by ReDigi's used digital music marketplace effects transfer of a music file without copying, but by modifying the record locator in an 'atomic transaction,' and how it verifies that only a single instance of a unique file can enter the ReDigi cloud system. ReDigi's opposition papers also point out plaintiff's own admissions that mp3 files are not 'material objects' or 'phonorecords' under the Copyright Act, and therefore not subject to the Copyright Act's distribution right, and defend ReDigi's used digital music marketplace and cloud storage system (PDF) on a number of grounds, including the First Sale exception to the distribution right applicable to a 'particular' copy, the Essential Step exception to the distribution right applicable to a copy essential to the running of a computer program, and Fair Use space shifting."
Slashdot refuses to report a story.
According to Reuters, Apple surpassed Android in marketshare by the end of 2011, confirming earlier reports by both Nielsen and NPD. 150 Android smartphones couldn't beat the iPhone 4S, and with 15 million iPads sold last quarter, the tablet market is now larger than the entire desktop PC market.
Who cares? Well, when 2011 started, Slashdot triumphantly reported that Android surpassed iOS in marketshare. In fact, Android fans on Slashdot constantly cited Android's marketshare as proof that it was taking over the industry, that openness was superior to the "walled garden", and that Android was "winning". Marketshare is still fetishized around here and considered a sign of victory.
So, what happens when the opposite happens and Apple erases Android's marketshare lead by the end of the year? Despite multiple submissions from several users, and news coverage ranging from Arstechnica to CNN, Slashdot refuses to publish the story.
This is a Linux advocacy site whose early userbase was driven by hatred of Windows marketshare. Anything negative about the marketshare of Linux or platforms based on Linux, gets killed. Slashdot is intentionally not providing you full tech news coverage because it wants to cater to a specific demographic of emotionally-invested users who are more likely to generate repeat page views.
Heh, for a second there, I thought they were talking about Redigit.
it might be best to couple the modifications currently being done with a recompression of the mp3 itself.
It's like real life! No one's going to want an mp3 that's changed 20 hands at that point.
Viable Slashdot alternatives: https://pipedot.org/ and http://soylentnews.org/
For some bullshit I doubt anyone wants, seriously you can buy the best the world has to offer for 99 cents a track, what kind of horseshit DRM system to I have to infect windows with and dance around just to save what? 25 fucking cents in the end?
Then what gives them the right to tell us we can't resell it?
And if it doesn't have a real value, why should we pay for it?
Or people will just download their music, legally or illegally, from the most convenient source available to them.
Palm trees and 8
This guy was NOT just convicted for downloading bomb making instructions BUT for the COMBINATION of downloading bomb making instructions, compiling a price list for components, weapons and ammo AND a letter offering himself as a recruit for Jihad.
Granted, I can't see any proof in the full story he wrote the letter or made the list BUT it is the combination of these things that led to the prosecution and conviction. That he pleaded guilty also hints there is more going on.
To get the car anology out of the way, if you are arrested for being drunk behind the wheel of your parked car you CANNOT run a story claiming that you were arrested for buying beer. Nor were you arrested for being drunk, you were being arrested for being drunk in car behind the wheel (it being parked doesn't matter, you are not allowed in the driving seat drunk).
Nit picking? Yes because if you want to rage about civil rights you need to come up with a coherent story, not a story that will be picked apart in 2 seconds by your opponents.
Imagine for instance the case of Rosa Parks, you would make the racists case if you went to defend her and hinged your entire case that she was forced to go to the back of bus for being a woman...
IF you think this case is wrong, you need to fight the case, not some made up case by a slashdot editor with a grudge on his shoulder. It is the combination of documents that lead to the case NOT a single document on its own.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Since 2005 people have been asking me all kinds of questions about what you can do with your digital music after purchasing it. Now along comes a case where I'm actually litigating, and the court will be deciding, those types of issues, and the comments seem to be all off topic. Oh well.
Ray Beckerman +5 Insightful
When an mp3 is sold, it is not being transferred from the provider's server to the buyer's computer...it is being copied.
Every time products get deliberately borked in order to sell non-borked versions at a higher price, a part of me gets very angry. I can see the commercial sense in it, but it does not stop the anger.
Would you like a slice of toast?
Welcome back! (Sorta).
I for one had wondered what you had been up to on these matters. With the explosion of wins for the Copyright enforcement brigade, I had entertained the thought that you were threatened into submission!
Onward.
How are you handling the "Almost-Unique" file situation? Besides simple physical file mods, I'll include stuff like "chopping off the dumb trailing gratuitous horn finale" etc. I suppose it would be a Derivative work, except my question centers around it being a trivial change for the sake of changing the file, rather than claiming real creativity.
Otherwise, is the concept that if the first person buys the music, then it can float around for free forever on first sale logic ever after? (Like stuff that can go to endless flea markets.)
So suppose a service buys X copies of each song, as a "repository", then sells them used? Then once they're second hand, they stay that way right?
YAAL. Hooray!
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
I find it hilarious that the people arguing for allowing resale are probably the same people that bitch about DRM.
You can't resell something that cannot be adequately protected through DRM, period. If you sell someone something that can be easily obtained for free then what value are you selling back? Selling back a non-DRM protected song sounds more like a Con rather then a legitimate business practice.
But, if digital content is protected by DRM that allows only one user to access it, then I would agree users should be able to sell the license for the digital content so another person can take ownership of that license. It means the original owner can no longer access the content.
If you support the concept of reselling digital content, they you are embracing DRM. But you can't have it both ways, DRM-Free content that you can sell to other people, that is called PIRACY!
There is no freaken way in hell that the government is going to allow you to profit off of someone else's intellectual property, period. Get over it and move along.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
If you mo
Add an inaudible (to the human ear) digital watermark?
To see this won and applied to e-books as well. In many cases books for kindle are more expensive than paper books yet you can turn around and sell a physical book after you've read it and you (currently) can't do the same with an e-book.
Aah, planned obsolescence; she is a bitch, no?
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
If I buy a hammer, I can give it away, I can loan to a friend, I can rent it out, or I can sell it. If you can't do all of these things you don't actually own something.
Totally laughable. The concept is so ridiculous it defies comprehension. It defies hyperbole. It goes past hyperbole returns at the other end and becomes an understatemen. I am a designer I demand payment from people sitting on chairs.
Not only that, but chips with features deliberately disabled in order to have budget and premium versions :O
I know that some of that partly comes down to the manufacturing processes naturally making sub-standard chips, but still, /angry face/
Would you like a slice of toast?
Such things tend to be pretty useless because they're exactly the sort of thing that lossy compression algorithms strip out to save space -- and if every anyone invented a way to insert one that existing compression algorithms didn't remove, the algorithms people would be very interested in it so that they could improve the algorithm (which would then go back to stripping it out).
As an experiment, ReDigi could put a "Send $.05 to the artists" button on each track. The money would be collected and divided among the singers, writers, performers and producers of each track.
The trick is to identify who they all are. Would an artist get 3 shares if they were the singer/songwriter + 1/5th of the band?
All ideas^H^H^H^H^Hprocesses in this post are Patent Pending. (as well as the process of patenting all postings)
Yea, I hate that too.
The silver lining, however, is that with enough perseverance and knowhow, one can get the "premium" features at the budget price.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
Yes, sometimes I feel that just being smart and informed enough to cheat gives me a right to :D (Especially when it feels we've been cheated out of the stuff we're clawing back in the first place)
Would you like a slice of toast?
The owner had a good idea and the RIAA got jealous.
I know we all want to retain the right to resell what we have purchased, even at a loss, but this system seems to have a DRM that isn't terribly effective. It looks like an obvious flaw, and no one's pointing it out, so I guess we're supposed to pretend we don't see it?
It appears I can make a back up of my iTunes music, install the files on a secondary computer which is running the ReDigi DRM software, and sell them from there. This would not impact my files on my iOS devices, nor would it affect the files on my primary computer which does not have ReDigi installed.
The only way I could see this meeting a bulletproof Rights Management standard would be for the only non-ephemeral copies to be stored in the locker in the first place: in other words, you'd have to download directly from iTunes to the cloud, so that no copy of the song would ever reside on your computer. Once you have the file on your system, there will always be a way to copy it, and the DRM agent isn't omniscient.
The real problem is that trying to work around such artificial restrictions is even considered cheating...
The owner had a good idea and the RIAA got jealous.
Yeah, one of the funniest things in the record company's papers is the statement that
ReDigi promises that its âoeVerification Engineâ analyzes each file to ensure that it was âoelegally downloadedâ by the user in the first instance and thus âoeeligible for sale.â Given the widespread piracy of sound recordings on the Internet â" an issue with which we have been struggling for more than a decade â" it is questionable whether ReDigi can effectively determine whether files were lawfully obtained in the first instance.
To this I responded:
I.e., because plaintiff is inept and has been wasting its money on frivolous litigation instead of the development of useful technology which protects copyright, therefore it is âoequestionableâ whether ReDigi can have accomplished what plaintiff never could. Well it may be âoequestionableâ to Mr. McMullan, but it is the fact. And he offers not a shred of evidence to the contrary.
Ray Beckerman +5 Insightful