ReDigi Defends Used Digital Music Market 111
NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "ReDigi has fired back, opposing Capitol Records's motion for a preliminary injunction. In his opposition declaration, ReDigi's CTO Larry Rudolph explains in detail (PDF) how the technology employed by ReDigi's used digital music marketplace effects transfer of a music file without copying, but by modifying the record locator in an 'atomic transaction,' and how it verifies that only a single instance of a unique file can enter the ReDigi cloud system. ReDigi's opposition papers also point out plaintiff's own admissions that mp3 files are not 'material objects' or 'phonorecords' under the Copyright Act, and therefore not subject to the Copyright Act's distribution right, and defend ReDigi's used digital music marketplace and cloud storage system (PDF) on a number of grounds, including the First Sale exception to the distribution right applicable to a 'particular' copy, the Essential Step exception to the distribution right applicable to a copy essential to the running of a computer program, and Fair Use space shifting."
Man that sounds like a lot of effort (Score:4, Interesting)
For some bullshit I doubt anyone wants, seriously you can buy the best the world has to offer for 99 cents a track, what kind of horseshit DRM system to I have to infect windows with and dance around just to save what? 25 fucking cents in the end?
Re:This is extremely laughable. (Score:4, Interesting)
Sure you can. It's actually quite easy. You're missing a fairly fundamental concept, which is this: what is necessary to prevent playback of copies is not required to merely prevent sale of those copies. To do the former, it must be impossible to get a decryption key without proving that you are the current owner. This is fundamentally impossible to do in an unbreakable way, and the harder you try, the worse the customer experience is. By contrast, to do the latter, you need only the ability to uniquely identify each sold copy of a file. This requires nothing more than a guarantee from the companies that sell the original tracks that there will never be two identical copies of the track, plus a verifiable, ideally signed marker of some sort to determine authenticity.
In other words, to support resale of commercially-sold tracks, you need only take advantage of the watermarks that most or all of those services put in the tracks to begin with. Tracks are usually sold with additional info in the track's metadata that ties it to a particular user's account so that if it gets pirated, it can be traced back to the person who illegally distributed it.
This means that every digital download is unique and trivially verifiable as authentic or inauthentic without the need for actual DRM that would limit your ability to play the file. Thus, all that is necessary is a central database that every reseller talks to, in which the current ownership of every track that gets sold is tracked based on which account purchased it originally.
At least I'm assuming this is how they're doing it. It's certainly the most straightforward and obvious way to do it.
What this does not do, of course, is prevent you from making a copy before you sell the track. However, resale of physical CDs and DVDs has exactly the same problem, making this argument largely irrelevant as far as drawing a legal distinction between the two types of resale.