ReDigi…A Court Success?

Industry’s Attempt to Shut ReDigi Failed

The motion of the music industry for a preliminary injunction ended up ditched. ReDigi, the first online seller of used digital music in the world, was launched in 2011. Unsurprisingly, the copyright issues that the site stepped right into arouse once the music industry found out about its existence.
Now, the recent news tells the story of a victorious ReDigi service against music label Capitol Records. The latter had accused the site of representing a “clearinghouse” for copyright violation as it allows visitors to buy and sell music that has been previously purchased on iTunes. Two weeks ago the opposition filed a motion of the victorious brief on the preliminary injunction.

In response, ReDigi held up the argument of the “first sale doctrine”. The latter grants the service a right to resell digital music. However, the recording industry insisted that the only method to move music around was to create copies upon copies without actually knowing for sure that originals were being deleted.

Meanwhile, search giant Google allied with the new service in proving why the lawsuit the recording industry filed against ReDigi can’t be regarded as a healthy one for the Internet business. Although the U.S. District Judge Richard Sullivan originally dismissed the search giant’s attempts to meddle in the case, he ultimately had to admit that a court ruling favourable to the music industry in this case, which “raises much of technological and statutory issues”, could have created a dangerous ground for the future.

Indeed, the oncoming lawsuit reveals a number of mighty important aspects that could interest not just the music and movie industries and newly emerged business models, but the music consumers and media giants as well.