At the risk of further muddying this forum: I’m posting in GQ under the assumption not all legal / copyright questions are matters of debate or humble opinion.
Questions regarding the sale of a used iPod (.mp3 player) with 10,000 songs dowloaded on it vs. the sale a used iPod with no songs on a site like eBay:
Could someone selling a fully loaded iPod and ask a higher than market price?
=> Or for that matter, a 200 disk CD player fully loaded with 200 CD-R’s.
=> Or come to think of it, a used PC with an unscrubbed ‘My Music’ folder.
My hunch is not legal - but only vaguely so.
My guess is someone’s probably tried it already. Not that anyone could make a windfall doing it, illegal mp3 files are readily available anyway. Whether or not they were batted down would only be a matter of speculation.
Yeah, you already knew the answer to this. Unless you’ve produced all the music on the iPod yourself and own all the copyrights, you don’t have the right to resell the music.
Even the case where you’ve paid to download the music legally, left the copy protection schemes in place, * and * deleted all your other copies of the tunes is pretty murky – as you’ve guessed, someone has tried EBaying a song downloaded from iTunes (http://news.com.com/2100-1027_3-5071566.html?tag=fd_top).
You could probably get away with selling a service where someone hands you an iPod, a list of tunes, and their CD collection and you sell your time ripping and loading (legal) music onto it or downloading the tunes from a on-line music store.
Isn’t this the same as buying a Will Smith CD, and later selling it to a used Music store, and then they go around and resell it? I don’t see how it’s different just because it’s a file on some type of permanent medium. You buy it, you own it, you should be able to sell it, IMO.
Or for that matter selling my Will Smith CD on eBay… How is it different?
Well, here’s a hypothetical. Suppose in the EULA (End User License Agreement) that no one reads when they buy software (or music), it says that you as the buyer agree not to resell the music. In that case, it would be different because you’d have agreed to a (probably) legally binding contract not to re-sell it.
I don’t know if the EULA for online music stores contains such a clause, but it wouldn’t surprise me.
You’re not selling the file…You’re selling copies of that file. I don’t know iTunes well, but I’d guarantee that somewhere in the small print you sign up to when purchasing is that you cannot resell the rights to the file.
It’s an issue of the iTunes EULA. It could be legal, though more likely, it is not. It all depnds on what basis you can download onto the iPod. Does it say “personal use only”? Are there limits to how many times you can download? Is there anything forbidding you from disposing of the iPod as you see fit? And, of couse, has this been challenged in court?
(I am assuming, BTW, that these are legally downloaded files. If you don’t have the right to download, then you don’t have the right to copy and it is a violation.)
Now, most likely, the wording of the EULA prohibits you from selling or giving away the music. However, if there were no prohibition, and you were allowed to copy the music freely to the iPod (and, I know that other music services allow multiple copies onto a portable device), then you can do what you want with the filled iPod. Whether you’re making a profit or not is not a concern of copyright.
I suppose if you sold the iPod with the original CDs that you ripped all of its music from, and wiped those MP3 files from your own computer, you’d be okay.