Company called ReDigi is set up to "resell" "used" iTunes downloads; RIAA is, as you might guess,
not amused.
ReDigi's argument hinges on the loophole that the iTunes EULA doesn't use the word "license", claiming that it therefore doesn't impose any additional restrictions on top of standard copyright law.
RIAA's argument, therefore, hinges not on the standard "it's a license; you don't own the track" argument, but on the fact that the file has to be copied and therefore you're selling an unlicensed copy, not the copy you own.
Don't know what the lawyer perspective is in all this (I have certain guesses about what TA is going to say and what Paco is going to say), but the technical one is that the "copy of a copy" distinction is completely fucking meaningless.
Leaving aside that a song is copied to memory and then deleted every single goddamn time you play it, and that a typical iTunes user has two copies of every song (one on the computer and one on the iPod), the concept of an "original copy" is meaningless on a computer. If you defrag your hard drive, you've copied the bits to a different location; the "original" is gone. Back up your library, reinstall Windows, restore? Well, even assuming the backup was legal (and in the case of iTunes, it probably is, as no decryption is required to copy a file, just to play it), you're now working with a copy of a copy (of a copy of a copy of a copy, quite possibly).
The entire concept of a "move" on a computer is an abstraction. There's no such thing. There's a copy/delete (where "delete" itself is an abstraction for "mark as okay to overwrite"), and there's rewrite location information.
The copy/delete operation that ReDigi relies on is functionally equivalent to the move operation you perform when you move a file from one partition to another.
Of course, the flipside of this is that ReDigi's argument that it "deletes the original file" is bullshit. I don't know enough about how FairPlay works to categorically state that it's impossible for ReDigi to de-authorize your DRM'ed music so it won't play under your account anymore, but that frankly seems unlikely, and, moreover, Apple's been selling DRM-free music for years at this point. You deleted the file from the iTunes directory? Great. Did you delete every copy from the hard drive? From ALL the hard drives? From all mounted CD's and memory sticks? From all UNmounted CD's and memory sticks? From CD's and memory sticks that are not currently in the computer?
From, oh, I don't know, the user's iPod?
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Topic: Another thread on copyright/patent/trademark law (Read 58768 times)