US Court about to rule whether first-sale doctrine applies to digital music
Last Friday, the district court in Manhattan, New York, heard the opening arguments in the case between EMI and ReDigi. The central question in this lawsuit is whether the first-sale doctrine applies to digital music. ReDigi is a digital marketplace that allows users to sell their legally purchased digital music and was launched in October 2011. In January 2012, ReDigi was sued by Capitol Records, a subset of EMI.
EMI argues that digital music is not the same as music on CDs or books, as there is no way to guarantee that the original owner deletes all his copies of the files after he resales the music. Therefore, the first-sale doctrine does not apply to digital music, says EMI. EMI demands $150,000 for each song in EMI's catalogue that was sold via ReDigi's services since its launch.
According to ReDigi, only files originally downloaded from iTunes can be uploaded and resold. ReDigi's software verifies whether the files are bought legally and erases them from the seller's computer after they have been uploaded to ReDigi's servers. Tracks ripped from CDs or obtained from other stores are excluded from ReDigi's services.
It is expected that this case will set a precedent regarding the application of the first-sale doctrine on digital goods in the United States. In July, the European Court of Justice ruled in a somewhat similar case that the copyright exhaustion rule applies to software that is legally downloaded from the Internet. In this case, UsedSoft traded used licenses of Oracle software. The ECJ remarked that the exhaustion rule only applies under the following circumstances: the user license is unlimited in time, the compensation paid for the software matches the economic value of the software and the original user disables his own copy of the software.
Read more about the first-sale doctrine on FutureOfCopyright.com:
Source: BBC
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