Judge Rules That Resale of MP3s Violates Copyright Law

Redigi runs a service that lets you resell your digitally purchased music. Naturally, they were sued by major labels soon after going live, with heavyweights like Google weighing in with support and an initial victory against pre-trial injunctions. But the first actual court ruling is against them. Pikoro writes "A judge has sided with Capitol Records in the lawsuit between the record company and ReDigi — ruling that MP3s can only be resold if granted permission by copyright owners. From the article: 'The Order is surprising in light of last month's United States Supreme Court decision in Kirtsaeng v. Wiley & Sons, which reaffirmed the importance and applicability of the First Sale Doctrine in the United States of America.'" Redigi vows to appeal, and claims that the current version of their service is not affected by the lawsuit.

Comments

Re:Let's look at this more closely

[FireFury03]

Clearly the judge is a firm believer in piracy, else he wouldn't have made that ruling. Seriously though, people are trying to sell "used" mp3's?

Well why not? The media industry is selling time-unlimited licences to play an MP3 - that licence clearly has value, otherwise no one would be willing to pay for it. When you don't want to use it any more, why shouldn't you be able to reclaim some of the value by selling the licence on to someone else? The doctrine of first sale prevents vendors from preventing people from reselling physical goods, why shouldn't the same apply to anything which has value (such as a licence)?