Cptl pwn'd Digimon - Law Relish
GatorToof
582 Posts
My friend was telling me about an interesting recent court settlement between Capitol and an NY based mp3 reseller (whose name is something like digigogo, or digimo, idk).
Anyway, the afor mentioned site purchases certified downloads from their owners, erases the copied file, and resells them for a fair and reasonable price. So, Capitol suitedfor copyright infringement and a resell clause. Of course, this issue has been examined for a long time, in different ways.
Sorry I this is vague. Another member might be able to explain the issue in more concise detail.
Thoughts?
Anyway, the afor mentioned site purchases certified downloads from their owners, erases the copied file, and resells them for a fair and reasonable price. So, Capitol suitedfor copyright infringement and a resell clause. Of course, this issue has been examined for a long time, in different ways.
Sorry I this is vague. Another member might be able to explain the issue in more concise detail.
Thoughts?
Comments
Did the court rule the transaction illegal due to the actual transfer (shipping and recieveing of the file)? Additionally, was Capitol only concerned in files of certain artists/titles?
Go figure.
And this is what happens when people who don't know what they're talking about think they can put one over on the entire industry.
What caught my eye was that iTunes and Amazon are trying to patent reselling technology in case that market becomes viable. Can't see digital reselling ever being sanctioned by labels, studios or publishers but I think ReDigi are still in business for the moment. I'm siding with the labels on this one, despite their fuckwittery on just about every other digital level.
Yeah, if the labels had taken a more grown-up attitude to digital when the opportunity presented itself, the world would be very different now. But then that's one of the paradoxes of the modern music industry - that something so reliant upon cutting-edge technology and innovation for a significant chunk of its business should be so doggedly resistant to cutting-edge etc. in other areas of the same business.
I'd imagine that the distinction between reselling a finite number of physical copies and reselling an infinite number of digital copies probably came up too. The idea of digital reselling technology is interesting, but I'm inclined to agree with you that it's unlikely to ever get the green light. It's equally unlikely to prevent digital retailers from attempting to patent it either. It's a little like the (possibly apocryphal) story from years ago about Philip Morris supposedly trademarking the brand-name Marley in readiness for the legalisation of weed.
Saying, "shame on you" to the labels might be just a top down way of dealing with the digital consumerism. It would be hard to tell if more stringent regulations would even have an affect on sharing and copying. (bootleg tapes, cds, hard drives, whatever)
I wish I knew more about it.
It wouldn't have needed stringent regulations - if anything, stringent regulations have self-evidently failed to solve any of the problems, and may have even created a whole bunch more. All they had to do was listen to the people - and there were quite a few of them - who were telling them way back in the 90s that digital was the future, or at least a future, and that they should be looking at ways of monetising it. Instead, they laughed them out of the house, on some "we fear change" shit. And who's laughing now?
Comparing bootleg tapes with digital copying was always false equivalence, though. Historically, the business has lacked the nerve to tackle the industrial-level bootlegging of the past (tape-copying, etc), because that kind of piracy is invariably linked to organised crime.
Who?
While you are away, my guess is everyone at Capitol, especially the lawyers, because usually people laugh after laying the smack-down on someone else.
Well, certainly not the industry. They can continue wielding the legislature like a Louisville Slugger as much as they like, and there'll be cases, I'm sure, where they'll have both the law and the moral highground in their favour. But ultimately, all they're doing is attempting to get the genie back into the bottle, which as we all know is never going to happen. None of these victories are going to restore the industry's fortunes, any more than they're going to prevent cyber-hucksters like ReDigi from testing the limits of the law. And eventually the law's going to change.
Take a look at Three Man Records. They are doing all kinds of interesting things to add value to their record sales. Split singles, colored vinyl, flexi-disc, custom covers, vault futures, ect. When consumers took 3man merchandise to eBay, 3man upped the price. This has nothing to do with Jack Whites music and is hard to connect back to the case between Capitol and reDigi. However, the 3man records are somewhat of a interesting promotional tool for the live band. Since the band owns the label, there is no reason for the label, to be worried about leaked songs, when their merch. is more for promo.