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RIAA claims you do not own your iTunes music purchases

extremetech.com

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Re: RIAA claims you do not own your iTunes music purchases

#11

Post by earbitscom »

jasonlotito wrote: post #10
earbitscom wrote: post #8

1. This service is ridiculous and I'm embarrassed that they raised nearly as much funding as we did for it. Who on earth didn't see this coming? 2. Deleting "the original" when it's so easy to have your own other copy somewhere doesn't do anything. How do they even begin to answer this concern? 3. How can the RIAA argue in one breath that you don't own their product, that it's just a license, and argue in court in an…

2. The same could be said of CDs and DVDs. Especially if you follow up with the license bit. Basically, if you can sell your CD licensed music, why can't you sell your other digitally licence music? If both are dealing with licenses, and you can sell one, the argument is you can sell the other. I agree, it's ridiculous, but I think it's that way mostly because of the RIAA's way of defining things.

If you can only sell the DVD but not the copy, then the original owner paid more for it, ends up with less value, and the new owner, if they wanted to sell it, would have the same issue. Further, you have to transfer a physical product, which at the prices of used DVDs makes very little sense and has a minor impact on the industry. Being able to sell a copy that costs nothing to make or ship is more damaging. It's not that they wish you couldn't sell your DVDs, too, but it's not as important a fight as digital copies.

Re: RIAA claims you do not own your iTunes music purchases

#12

Post by rcfox »

jasonlotito wrote: post #9
tedunangst wrote: post #4

"If ReDigi’s service can accurately prevent users from accessing songs they’ve sold to the service, then the RIAA’s rights have been legally preserved." Big if. How is ReDigi going to prevent users from downloading song backups from dropbox?

Good faith effort. It doesn't have to do it flawlessly. Same thing applies to physical media. How can you guarantee that I don't have access to the music after I've sold a CD. And while you might argue that their is a difference between CD's and digital music, the RIAA doesn't see it the same way. FTA: "the RIAA and MPAA have argued that purchasing a physical CD or DVD simply grants one a license to use the product r…

> Good faith effort. It doesn't have to do it flawlessly.

From what I gather from TFA, they are nowhere near what the industry could consider a good faith effort. They basically need some way to invalidate the original file (and any illegitimate copies of it) while keeping the legitimate copy valid.

Re: RIAA claims you do not own your iTunes music purchases

#13

Post by bradleyland »

larrik wrote: post #3

It seems to me that deleting the original file is hardly good enough. I think that a secondary market for digital works is something that will just never work like it does for physical media, and that's something we just have to accept and move on with. My biggest worry is that ReDigi is going to end up losing a lawsuit that sets a bad precedent and makes future better technologies impossible. That said, the RIAA's o…

I think that in 100 years, we'll all look back at this time period of intellectual property hoarding as something akin to the dark ages.

Re: RIAA claims you do not own your iTunes music purchases

#14

Post by VladRussian »

it is easy. If you own you re-sell what you own. If you granted the rights under the license, you re-sell the rights granted under the license until the license states that the rights aren't transferrable. You agreed to the license. All this licenses and ToS are complete crap, yet until the law changed, the law seems to favor the crap. And by complacently agreeing to it, we help to proliferate it.

Re: RIAA claims you do not own your iTunes music purchases

#15

Post by reginaldo »

andylei wrote: post #7
reginaldo wrote: post #6

I was surprised by the following: The Guild voices some valid concerns, including the fear that publishers might try to prominently position loss leader books in the lending library in order to drive sales of other authors — but this sort of activity is already prohibited by existing clauses and is more an issue between publisher and author than anything that involves Amazon. Why is such strategy (using a loss leader…

this is good for overall volume, but if you're the author of the loss leader, you may get significantly less revenue

Ok. That makes sense... I was thinking about supermarkets/grocery stores when I originally asked the question, as they do this all the time. The situation is different when there's an author who'll complain.

Re: RIAA claims you do not own your iTunes music purchases

#16

Post by jneal »

Unfortunately I feel ReDigi is most in the wrong here and not necessarily the RIAA. All someone has to do is go into their iTunes and redownload the file they previously purchased, or make a copy before making it available to ReDigi. It may have been meant to be a legal way of selling used songs, but I feel that is just not possible in a digital world.

Re: RIAA claims you do not own your iTunes music purchases

#17

Post by leeoniya »

while there is nothing that prevents you from making copies. there can be a certificate of original purchase issued to you and registered/signed to a specific user's public key in a cloud database.

upon sale of the electronic item, you can re-sign/update the cloud cert with the new owner's key. so if a it came to proving that you own the music, you can reference a cloud database and decrypt the signature.

it's really the only way forward that comes to mind without being invasive but still allowing enforcement.

Re: RIAA claims you do not own your iTunes music purchases

#18

Post by rcfox »

jneal wrote: post #16

Unfortunately I feel ReDigi is most in the wrong here and not necessarily the RIAA. All someone has to do is go into their iTunes and redownload the file they previously purchased, or make a copy before making it available to ReDigi. It may have been meant to be a legal way of selling used songs, but I feel that is just not possible in a digital world.

Agreed.

The cliched statement is that digital piracy isn't stealing because you aren't depriving someone else of the artifact. It works both ways: you can't sell digital artifacts because you aren't depriving yourself of the original.

Re: RIAA claims you do not own your iTunes music purchases

#19

Post by feralchimp »

The RIAA is, shock/horror, right in this case. First Sale Doctrine is not a free pass to make copies of digital media.

A friend of mine is the principal at SmartFlix, so I've had the opportunity to hear a lot of rubber-meets-the-road detail on first sale doctrine over the past few years.

Re: RIAA claims you do not own your iTunes music purchases

#20

Post by roc »

larrik wrote: post #3

It seems to me that deleting the original file is hardly good enough. I think that a secondary market for digital works is something that will just never work like it does for physical media, and that's something we just have to accept and move on with. My biggest worry is that ReDigi is going to end up losing a lawsuit that sets a bad precedent and makes future better technologies impossible. That said, the RIAA's o…

MDY v Blizzard [1] already set an (absurd, unconscionable) precedent that people who purchased World of Warcraft did not own their copy of the digital work, but were licensees -- regardless of whether they ever agreed to the EULA or the service's Terms of Use.

Further, the court held that copying a digital work into in-system memory by any program not 'unauthorized' by the rights-holder constituted infringement and the operator thus subject to statutory penalties. (Seriously. Let that and its implications sink in.)

So the bad precedent already exists. And not only does it set some troublesome legal hurdles for future technologies, but a large swath of current technologies are suddenly in a very tenuous (and expensive) legal situation.

If the RIAA sticks to this 'license' argument, they could hold that not only is it infringement to copy your DRM-free iTunes tracks out of iTunes, but so much as playing your iTunes-purchased tracks via software other than iTunes is infringement (as it necessarily requires loading a copy of that digital work into memory).

[1] http://docs.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/arizona...

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