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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."
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.
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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?"
The government does.
Or people will just download their music, legally or illegally, from the most convenient source available to them.
Palm trees and 8
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
This comment was NOT posted in the right discussion.
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
You can't resell something that cannot be adequately protected through DRM
The problem is that Physics and Computer Science show that there can be no cheap and effective DRM.
All ideas^H^H^H^H^Hprocesses in this post are Patent Pending. (as well as the process of patenting all postings)
This is not explicitly true. Many products are routinely sold that can be obtained for free, given the labor of obtaining is a sufficiently arduous task. The person is really buying the convenience of a harvested product.
Take for instance, oxygen, or nitrogen gas. (Especially nitrogen). You gan collect copious quantities of it for free. However, the task of harvesting and refining it is nontrivial, and possibly expensive in both time and invested infrastructure. As such, somebody that basically just pumps and superchills ordinary air, and in so doing fractionally distills out the nitrogen and bottles it (the nitrogen itself is still free), they can sell it as long as there is a demand.
Another example is dirt. You can scoop up dirt for free too, but people still buy it routinely.
See also: manure, compost, etc.
The value of the files, which can be easily sourced, is in the increased convenience of the service, and any implied goods accompanying that service, such as legal indemnification for posession. (Eg, you won't get sued by the riaa for downloading it.)
This value is set by what peope are willing to pay for it. Profitability can only occur if the price people are willing to pay is greater than the costs of offering it for sale.
You could argue that it could never be profitable... that's a reasonable argument. But you can't argue that it can't be sold. (One can sell at a loss.)
The real problem here is that this operation sets real limits on what the ACTUAL market value for the recording industry's digital products really are, instead of the artifically insisted upon values presented in court during infringement cases, and also the cumulative effects that such a service would produce.
Specifically, the recording industry relies on continually reselling copy from its back catalog. (60s and 70s classic rock, 80s music, 90s music, etc...) there is a demand for this because the old storage mediums break down with age, and require replacement. A digital resale locker like redigi permits the new sales of theroetically unaging copies (mp3s don't wear out....) to change hands potentially unlimited numbers of times. Coupled with continued first hand sales, an increasing supply of second hand files can theoretically end up in redigi's possession, saturating the market.
This will greatly impact the ability of the riaa and member labels to continue to snack on replacement/redundant copy sales, which accounts for the vast majority of their revinue stream.
That's why they hate redigi, and also why we should embrace redigi.
I think I fall into the realm you find so laughable. Here are my two feelings. They do not conflict in my mind.
1) You should, legally, be able to do it.
2) It's not technically feasible without DRM so I'd never do it.
Just because something is legal doesn't mean it's smart. It's legal to dance the Macarena. I feel fairly strongly that it should remain legal. However, I have no plans to ever do it.
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Add an inaudible (to the human ear) digital watermark?
Sure you can. It's actually quite easy. You're missing a fairly fundamental concept, which is this: what is necessary to prevent playback of copies is not required to merely prevent sale of those copies. To do the former, it must be impossible to get a decryption key without proving that you are the current owner. This is fundamentally impossible to do in an unbreakable way, and the harder you try, the worse the customer experience is. By contrast, to do the latter, you need only the ability to uniquely identify each sold copy of a file. This requires nothing more than a guarantee from the companies that sell the original tracks that there will never be two identical copies of the track, plus a verifiable, ideally signed marker of some sort to determine authenticity.
In other words, to support resale of commercially-sold tracks, you need only take advantage of the watermarks that most or all of those services put in the tracks to begin with. Tracks are usually sold with additional info in the track's metadata that ties it to a particular user's account so that if it gets pirated, it can be traced back to the person who illegally distributed it.
This means that every digital download is unique and trivially verifiable as authentic or inauthentic without the need for actual DRM that would limit your ability to play the file. Thus, all that is necessary is a central database that every reseller talks to, in which the current ownership of every track that gets sold is tracked based on which account purchased it originally.
At least I'm assuming this is how they're doing it. It's certainly the most straightforward and obvious way to do it.
What this does not do, of course, is prevent you from making a copy before you sell the track. However, resale of physical CDs and DVDs has exactly the same problem, making this argument largely irrelevant as far as drawing a legal distinction between the two types of resale.
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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
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?
Become the buyers? Never, thanx to the record/film industry lawyers and lobbyists who've stuffed congressmens pockets with big bucks for years.
Wuddooeyeno? IITYWYBMAD? Like nuts? eclecticallyincorrect.com
The owner had a good idea and the RIAA got jealous.
This addresses a problem with media-free content in general. How do you establish that you have the right to the files you have? What's to keep the government or Apple coming in and claiming all of a sudden that all of your stuff is pirated?
The "ownership" problem exists regardless of whether or not anyone wants to transfer that ownership.
Physical media is a nice token of exchange and proof of ownership in that regard.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Uh oh, a lot of antique shops and used car dealers are in for a big surprise. ;-)
(Let's assume you meant your comment specifically within the context of copyrighted content.) Are you saying used bookstores and used CDs stores don't work?
Beyond that, I wonder what "adequately protected through DRM" means. Has anything ever been adequately protected through DRM, or is this a purely hypothetical discussion?
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
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
If you support the concept of reselling digital content, they you are embracing DRM.
No. I'm saying that I think that DRM is awful and that I think the fact that some people may be dishonest in some people's eyes shouldn't prevent someone from reselling a digital good.
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!