Monday, January 09, 2012

Capitol Records sues ReDigi in federal court in Manhattan

On January 6th, Capitol Records filed a copyright infringement lawsuit, in federal court in Manhattan, against ReDigi Inc., a website which provides a used marketplace for digital music.

The judges assigned to the case are U. S. District Judge Richard J. Sullivan and U. S. Magistrate Judge Andrew J. Peck.

Attorneys for plaintiff are Cowan Leibowitz & Latman

Attorneys for defendant are Ray Beckerman, P.C.

Defendant's time to respond to the complaint expires January 27th.

Complaint

Commentary & discussion:

New York Times
Variety
Billboard
Kip Currier Copyright Blog



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4 comments:

rtk said...

Interesting! Please keep us as posted as you can.

Matt Fitzpatrick said...

Count 38 of the complaint is interesting. Would like to see how count 38's allegation that defendants induced people to violate the terms of service of a non-party, even if true, bears any relevance. Is it because the recording industry is trying to follow in the "licensed not sold" footsteps of the software industry?

Can't wait to see the answer. Guessing we'll see some first-sale, fair use, and DMCA safe harbor. I'm crossing my fingers for the first-sale defense, as I've been waiting for some "sold not licensed" pushback in the courts for a long time.

Anonymous said...

Am I completely off the beaten track when I suggest that this could have the potential to expand the First Sale Doctrine to the internet? And possibly even foreclose cases like Thomas-Rassett and Tennenbaum?

--Quiet Lurker

Anonymous said...

I find the industries lawyers argument regarding the issue of copies,material objects and phonorecords interesting and worth thinking further about.
In so far I also second Matt Fitzpatrick's comment

As I understand their argument they say because you "buy" a digital file -an original as they describe- it what the buyer then wants to resell is a copy one can not do that lawfully under your american first sale doctrine.

The tiny logical flaw -that even the file that a customer of amazon buys in the first place is NOT the original file amazon created or bought from the musiccompany but a copy that amazon created for the customer (or do the industry lawyers argument that they give amazon one million "digital originals" as they do with original physical disks and once amazon has sold those digital files then they have no more in stock??)- in the industries lawyers argument aside;
I buy the digital downloads, save each of it on one of my imagined hundrets of old 8MB compact flash cards seperately that this would be then the original "material object" that I can resell totally save under your fist sale doctrine?
(unfortunately my 8MB material objects cost more then the 79ct so this business is not viable at the moment, but flash drives get cheaper every day and if one orders one million with a capacity of just enough MB for one or two songs in total on it from the flash manufacturer the price they want might be business viable...)

Thats the logic i extract from Cowans argument in the complait :-)

(Reminds me of an old article on p2pnet.net about how much a big hdd full of music would be worth to you if you could buy one already legally filled with music copies)

Thanks music industry lawyers for giving me a business idea where i can make use of the first sale doctrine and not have to worry that the old industry guys that pay your bills get their cut off of that sale. Now all I need is a rich venture capitalist to get this "used miniflashcard resale" business started ;-)


--
Alter_Fritz