This is known as the “ first sale doctrine”.īut the copyright owner still retains all the exclusive rights of copyright and can restrain the purchaser of the book, or any other person who subsequently receives it, from acting within those exclusive rights, such as making a copy or adaptation of it. These two actions are permitted because the copyright owner’s rights in the book, as an item of tangible property, ceased at the time it was first sold. So if a person purchases a copy of a book that has been put on the market by the copyright owner, they can either give it to another person or sell it to a secondhand bookseller, who will in turn resell it. Once an article - such as a book - embodying copyright material has been put into circulation by, or with the authorisation of, the copyright owner, a person who obtains the article can do what they like with it, subject to restrictions. the rights of someone who purchases an article that embodies the copyright work.Whenever we talk about “property” and “ownership” in relation to copyright works, it is necessary to distinguish between the rights of While it may appear that copyright remains intact - the deletion of the original file after sale means only one person is possession of the track - the step of copying it to the cloud holds the key to the court’s decision. Once a buyer purchases a secondhand track, the original is deleted from the seller’s hard drive and the copy in the cloud is transferred to the buyer.
Used music cds for sale portable#
With the appearance of the first portable MP3 player in 1999 and the first peer-to-peer client, Napster, popularity of both the MP3 format and CD burners increased greatly – as did the music industry’s problems as music piracy started to rise. Using CD drives to copy files from (or “ rip”) commercial CDs, users could convert the digital music files into the MP3 format and either burn a new CD or share the file on the internet. The first recordable CD was produced by Japanese electronics firm Taiyo Yuden in 1988 and marketed in 1990, and CD burners, which became standard equipment in desktop and laptop computers, enabled consumers to make exact digital copies of CDs they had purchased.Īt the same time the MP3 file format ( developed by the German Fraunhofer Institute in 1988), which enables digital music files to be compressed into very small files, was rapidly becoming popular. In 1982 the first Compact Disc ( CD) players were released by electronics manufacturers Philips and Sony.Īs CD players and CDs became cheaper, CD sales boomed and largely replaced vinyl records and cassette tapes. Three decades of digital music formatsīefore the advent of digital storage, recorded music was distributed on vinyl records, 8-track, and cassette tapes. it is useful to review developments in music distribution over the past 30 years and consider how concepts of property and ownership apply to digital copyright works. To understand the decision in Capitol Records, LLC v ReDigi Inc.