Digital ReDigi Timeline

New MP3 resale site emerges

By | Published on Wednesday 23 February 2011

ReDigi

Oh, here we go again, another MP3 resale service has appeared on the horizon. Remember Bopaboo? No? Go on, it’s there somewhere deep in your memory, the website that allowed people to resell their MP3s to others providing they promised to delete their original copy once someone else had bought it off them.

It was one of those services plagued by copyright issues from the word go. I’m not quite sure what happened to it. Its owners made quite a bit of noise for a few weeks and then quietly disappeared – the company’s official blog is now turning up a lovely syntax error. I’m not sure it was around long enough for record companies to actually sue.

The new MP3 resale service has launched in the US and is called the ReDigi Marketplace. When Hypebot raised the copyright issues that surround their service, one of ReDigi’s founders Larry Rudolph was upbeat: “Being a group of computer geeks when someone tells us something can’t be done, we immediately set a course to figure out how to do it”.

He continued: “There are many layers that go into ReDigi that make it work, legal and technical being just a few. Our team figured out what could be done to legally ensure that consumers regain the freedom to manage their own personal music collections”.

Rudolph seems confident that as well as the technical framework he and his colleagues have built for ReDigi, they have also found a legal framework that will satisfy rightsholders. That includes passing a portion of any resale money back to the artist or label whose content is being resold.

I’m not convinced that will be enough to avoid a cease and desist from at least one major if and when ReDigi takes off, but it should be interesting to watch in the meantime.



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