Yes, I know. We’re a retailer of Music and Movies and, as such, we’re supposed to toe the party line and agree that record labels suing their customers into oblivion and other fascist RIAA tactics are fantastic. Well, that’s crap. These idiots in suits took the file-sharing phenomenon that was a minor fender-bender to the music industry and turned it into a 10 car high-speed pile up.
There was a point in 1999 and 2000 when the industry could have actually built upon file-sharing as a promotional tool and distribution method and saved themselves. Instead, these price-fixing jackasses decided to erase whatever small amount of goodwill the public had toward them.
We love music here. Tons of good music is released every year. I don’t buy the “CD sales are down because today’s music sucks” line. CD sales are down because the record companies are directly attacking their customers. Then they wonder why the customers attack back. There are a whole host of studies showing file-sharers actually buy more music because of it. I’m sure the industry will manage to kill that off, too.
I went on that rant because the RIAA just keeps getting more and more bizarre in their Queeg-like crusade to “solve” this whole file-sharing thing. Now Universal Music Group sat down, nervously rolled the metal balls around in their fingers, and decided that throwing away promotional CDs that you receive is a crime.
That’s right. According to UMG, you’re sitting there, you get an unrequested promotional CD you don’t want, you toss it, you’re a pirate.
In a brief filed in federal court yesterday, Universal Music Group (UMG) states that, when it comes to the millions of promotional CDs that it has sent out,…throwing them away is “an unauthorized distribution” that violates copyright law.
[...]
UMG sued [Troy Augusto, a reseller of promo CDs] last year, claiming that the “promotional use only” labels on the CDs mean that UMG owns them forever and that any resale infringes copyright.
EFF took Augusto’s case to fight for the proposition that a copyright owner can’t take away a consumer’s first sale rights just by putting a label on a CD (after all, the Supreme Court first recognized the first sale doctrine when a book publisher tried the same thing with a label stating “may not be sold for less than one dollar,” and we’ve seen patent owners trying the same trick on printer cartridges). In other words, EFF believes that if you bought it, or if someone gave it to you, you own it.
UMG seems to think that the “promotional use only” label somehow gives it “eternal ownership” over the CD…According to the first sale doctrine, once a copyright owner has parted with ownership of a CD, book, or DVD, whether by sale, gift, or other disposition, they may not control further dispositions of that particular copy (including throwing it away). It’s thanks to the first sale doctrine that libraries can lend books, video rental stores can rent DVDs, and you can give a CD to a friend for their birthday. It’s also the reason you can throw away any CD that you own.
It is exactly this type of indefensible behavior that makes consumers feel adversarial toward the recording industry.
No Responses to “Throwing Away Promo CDs is a Crime?”
No feedback yet.