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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

#51

Post by ugh »

pseudonym wrote: post #32
tedunangst wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The physical medium is the key. The CD serves to identify the correct/original/authorized/licensed/whatever copy. If you can't identify the original, then actually you can't sell it (in the sense of it's not possible).

In the case of the physical CD example, yes. But in the case of iTunes, there is no physical medium to be the key. Personally, I can't see this company working unless they can hook into iTune's servers and de-authorize the Apple account from having that song, and I don't foresee that happening at any point.

iTunes doesn’t use DRM anymore so deauthorizing won’t work.

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

#52

Post by duskwuff »

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…

> It seems to me that deleting the original file is hardly good enough.

Especially since iTunes will allow you to redownload content!

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

#53

Post by bluedanieru »

The RIAA are hypocrites of course as they have purposefully crafted an inconsistent legal position regarding the rights of consumers and musicians (with the intended effect being an answer of 'none'), however ReDigi's business model is fucking stupid. Taken to the extreme, you could use this to build a streaming service whereby the end-user only owns access to the content at the moment they are listening to it. I.e. you transfer the license to them, deduct some token amount from their account, stream the content, then refund it minus a percentage after the user is finished and no longer requires the license. That this might be technically legal under the current copyright scheme only underscores how ludicrous the whole game has become. Moral? Don't participate in it. Don't buy content if any of the money will make its way back to the RIAA, or the MPAA for that matter, as they are the ones fucking everything up and standing in the way of progress in the first place.

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

#54

Post by calloc »

andymoe wrote: post #27

You never owned your iTunes music purchases - you are licensing them. Take a gander at the EULA you clicked through without looking at.

So I can sell that license under the first-sale-doctrine right?

I sell my license to perform this song on a personal media player and thereby promise that I will no longer perform the song on a personal media player that I hold in my possession.

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

#55

Post by pseudonym »

ugh wrote: post #51
pseudonym wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the case of the physical CD example, yes. But in the case of iTunes, there is no physical medium to be the key. Personally, I can't see this company working unless they can hook into iTune's servers and de-authorize the Apple account from having that song, and I don't foresee that happening at any point.

iTunes doesn’t use DRM anymore so deauthorizing won’t work.

It doesn't, but it's more the fact of "removing your license to re-download the item".

Given that this particular attempt at DRM could probably be defeated by right click+copy into the same directory before "selling" the track, deleting off the local machine does absolutely nothing.

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

#56

Post by calloc »

tomp wrote: post #29

How is Amazon going to prove that at no time did it's users lend more books than Amazon bought from the publishers?

Amazon has a list of all the books in your library. It is not inconceivable that Amazon could provide a list of what books its users are currently reading/have in their library (including books they are lending) and providing such a list to the publishers/guild.

Is that proof enough? Who knows. Is it easily faked? Yes. But that is always going to be the case with anything digital. You either choose to believe them or you don't.

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

#57

Post by feralchimp »

leviathant wrote: post #35
feralchimp wrote: post #19

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.

Thing is, the RIAA has been arguing in court that the royalties they pay the artists for MP3s are based off physical sales, rather than license based sales. They're playing both sides of the argument. Should artists get paid for downloads using the same rates they agreed to for physical media? Or should downloads be treated like licenses, and artists get paid according to that scale? See also http://www.techdirt.com/…

Fair enough. I'm not arguing that the RIAA aren't pushy to a fault, I'm just saying they happen to have a reasonable interpretation of legal precedent to back up their claim w.r.t. this particular online music service.

Also, the "sale" vs. "license" debate is a many-more-than-two sided thing. At some level, we're always talking about licenses...purchase of a work does not confer to me all of the rights enjoyed by the copyright owner, period. And "licensing" a song is really licensing very specific rights (and usually for some finite period).

...coherent but entirely skippable ranting below this line...

This "debate" will progress when we can get some common ground on the following:

1. What exactly is the consumer licensed to do, in what circumstances?

2. How should the customer be expected to know this, given the inertia of media consumption history, and the fact that consumers generally don't sign contracts when they buy things?

3. Even if we can agree on what consumers' rights are (which we haven't, for reasons that all sides should frankly be ashamed of), how should the law deal with the dual facts that:

a) fine-grained enforcement is technically impossible, and

b) large scale infringement is technically and economically trivial for exactly the same populations that comprise the viable market for commercial content?

It would be nice if we at least (the highly-technical / entrepreneurial / probably not-starving community) could start holding ourselves to a higher standard. We owe society some answers that are more sophisticated and productive than "the old business model is broken, so it's okay to pirate until someone launches [new service from which I can get everything I want, when I want it, at a price that's easily affordable]."

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

#58

Post by feralchimp »

lekashman wrote: post #23

I was really intrigued by the section on Amazon in this article, in that they don't bother with licensing and go directly to purchasing the book so they can lend it. I think that Amazon's practice in this regard is much more significant than ReDigi's activity as it could spell out how future libraries function with regard to ebooks.

Local libraries are already using Amazon's system to lend e-books, and it's actually pretty cool. If all the copies are 'checked out,' you go on a waiting list. When a copy becomes available, you're notified, and you have a timeout window wherein you have to decide whether to a) check out the book, or b) lose your spot in the queue so the next reader gets a crack at it.

Pretty well thought-out.

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

#59

Post by brc »

kd0amg wrote: post #41
nobody31415926 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not unreasonable - you don't own World of Warcraft you own a license to play it. If you owned it you could reuse the characters in your own game, produce your own movie of the game and so on - not bad for a $50 investment. Think of the same with a book - you don't own the IP in the book and paying $0.99 on amazon doesn't give you the right to produce your own HP movie franchise. Redigi's business model is exac…

That's not unreasonable - you don't own World of Warcraft you own a license to play it. The distinction being made here is not between holding copyright and holding a license. It is between owning a copy and holding a license.

But this is why the concept of the software licence was developed. It is explicitly developed so that you don't take ownership of the item in the same way you take ownership of a DVD or printed book.

Holding copyright is not the same as owning an item. The parent comment is factually correct.

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

#60

Post by nobody31415926 »

learc83 wrote: post #48
nobody31415926 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since they presumably had access to Pasteur's book (even if it was in French) and so knew how to grow the correct yeast for beer - how did they manage to produce Budweiser and Miller ?

The answer to that would be the 18th Amendment.

Clever - so having failed to ban alcohol they just let market forces take their natural course and produce a beer that nobody would want to drink.
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