I’ve written quite a few pieces here about the various attempts to try to create a workable digital resale market—most recently with digital music resale firm ReDigi, which is currently engaged in a legal dispute with music label EMI over its activities. Now it looks as if, as with a lot of its digital media sales, Amazon may have achieved yet another leg up on the competition. On paidContent, Laura Hazard Owen reports that Amazon has been awarded a patent on the idea of a marketplace for “used” digital content. Amazon applied for it back in 2009, and it...

I’ve covered the Humble Indie Bundles here before—bundles of independent computer games sold at a pay-what-you-want price, in support of the developers and charities (usually Child’s Play and the Electronic Frontier Foundation). I’ve discussed the potential relevance to e-books, but the Humble Bundle’s latest move has possibly even more relevance—they’ve made the jump from games to digital music. The latest Humble Bundle is the Humble Music Bundle, which includes albums from MC Frontalot, They Might Be Giants, Christopher Tin, Hitoshi Sakimoto, Jonathan Coulton, and, for beating the average donation ($7.87 at the time of this writing), OK Go....

The Boston Globe has a report on the record labels’ lawsuit against ReDigi, the company that is trying to bring first sale rights to digital music (and, by extension, digital movie and book) sales. I’ve mentioned ReDigi a number of times, from when it was first conceived (after several similar used-digital-goods efforts failed miserably) to when it launched to when the record labels complained to when they sued in January. ReDigi claimed fair use, Google filed an amicus brief, and a judge decided ReDigi didn’t have to shut down pending the suit. If you’ve been following the...

Here are two articles that expressly discuss pirated music, but a lot of the same issues of morality and artist compensation apply to any pirated media—movies, games, and, yes, e-books. They make an interesting presentation of two sides of the piracy argument: what can be done to get artists paid for their music? On one side is 21-year-old NPR All Songs Considered intern Emily White, who penned a piece at the NPR website discussing how she’d accumulated her 11,000 song music collection largely by copying CDs from the radio station she ran, mix tapes from friends, and so on. She writes: As...

On the blog Expletive Inserted, Greg Cox has a look at the failure of Readability's subscribers-pay-for-content plan that I mentioned Readability has decided to close down. Distilling various voices from the blogosphere who have posted their own comments about the issue, Cox boils the lessons that can be learned down to two principles. The first is that the money doesn’t matter so much as the sense of entitlement. Readability is far from the only reformatter to charge its users, after all. The problem wasn’t so much that as it was that Readability was claiming to represent authors and publishers...

Here's a story that brings up the sharp contrast between the way labels are starting to treat digital music and the way publishers have been handling digital books. On TechCrunch, Mike Agovino, an executive from digital media company Triton Digital, discusses the royalty license situation around digital radio that has limited its wider adoption. Companies like Pandora have picked up many users and are increasing overall revenue—but due to the high royalties charged for streaming music over such a service, it is hard to find profitability that way. By comparison, traditional radio does not have to pay one cent in license fees...

CNet reports that Amazon is closing licensing deals with record labels to cover its cloud music service, Amazon Cloud Drive and Cloud Player. According to an anonymous source, it has already come to agreements with Universal Music Group, EMI, and Sony Music Entertainment, and is in talks with Warner Music Group. Although Amazon launched its services without licenses, touting fair use rights for users to upload and stream their own content, getting licensed would mean Amazon could add new features that go beyond fair use. While we don't know what new features Amazon will offer, the...

Novelist and music-industry expert Rob Reid has written an amusing satirical look at the high price of (being found guilty of) copyright violation on Ars Technica. When damages are set at $150,000 a song—more than the price of a five-bedroom home—it can start to seem a little ridiculous. This means, Reid points out, that a $249 iPod Classic can hold about $8 billion worth of music. (While it’s written from the perspective of digital music, it applies equally well to digital books. Indeed, since e-books are so much smaller than songs, a single Kindle or iOS device could probably hold...

Brian Stauffer, founder of 1999 digital music startup Listen.com (better known by the name of its music service, Rhapsody), had an interesting piece in the Wall Street Journal a few days ago comparing and contrasting the response of record labels and publishers to the digital changeover of their respective media, and the piracy issues these engendered. He begins by noting that e-book sales have largely made up the shortfall digital books took away from paper ones—but the music industry refused to sell digital music for years, depriving themselves of a stream of revenue and contributing to piracy. In...

A court in the UK has issued an order compelling UK ISPs to block access to The Pirate Bay, the BBC reports. Previously, the British Phonographic Industry (BPI) music lobby group had asked the ISPs to do so voluntarily, but they had declined to do so without an actual court order. Critics of the move warn that it could represent the start of a slippery slope toward censoring sites promoting other causes or behaviors. ISP Virgin Media told the BBC that content providers need to offer a carrot as well as a stick: "As a...

From an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education: The annual meeting of the Association of American Publishers reached one consensus: Fighting online piracy with legislation is not the way to go.  However, they agree that online piracy must be fought and controlled.  With what? That seems to be the question... still. Cary Sherman, the chairman and chief executive officer of the Recording Industry Association of America, agreed that "legislation brings out the worst in people" and that voluntary agreements are more flexible. After "the digital tsunami" of opposition that brought down SOPA and PIPA, he said, it's hard now to imagine...

The practice of windowing—staggering releases of some media work in different places or formats—has been common practice for the movie and television industry for some time. It used to be mainly a feature of staggering film releases from one part of the world to another, then from theater to video once video became an established format. Lately, it is being used to hold movies back from Netflix and Redbox after their release on home video. An example of windowing prompted The Oatmeal comic about someone seeking to buy the first season of A Game of Thrones that subsequently...