- If you have a CD or book you don't want anymore, you can sell it. The law says that's perfectly legal. But what about an MP3 or an e-book? Can you legally resell your digital goods?
This was the question before a judge in the case of Capitol Records v. ReDigi Inc.
So question. Let's say I buy a new CD today. I go home, listen to it, and go "man I want to listen to this when I bike." Its 2013 and I have no cd player, so I take the cd and put the music on my phone. I now have two copies of those songs, one digital and one physical, sort-of. Its for personal use, so great. Let's say I decide to sell the CD. Great, I no longer have a physical copy, but I haven't deleted the digital ones. Is that legal? I paid for the songs, after all, and while I owned the CD I had the song on my computer for convenience. Have I accidentally committed piracy? What if the CD gets damaged so I burn a new copy? Its happened before.
I suspect the reason no one has replied yet is because no one knows how to respond. IP laws make no sense anymore. As far as I can tell, courts will rule in favor of big business regardless, and they'll invent the most bizarre rationals for their rulings, hoping that no one will be able to untangle their threads of reasoning to see how silly it's all become. In this case, the judge seems to be saying that people who purchase digital works distributed over the Internet are actually (re)purchasing a piece of the hard drive or flash drive, which they've already purchased from a hardware retailer, because they paid to download the digital work to their hard drive or flash drive. Apparently, this is because a transporter malfunction on Star Trek resulted in Captain Kirk having to fight an evil twin duplicate of himself in the 23rd century. Or something like that. I just don't re-publish anything still being sold by whoever purchased the publication rights from the author, and hope that this IP mess will sort itself out someday. I'm afraid I really can't do any better than that without my brain shutting down from trying to parse absurd court rulings and legislative amendments.