Intellectual Property

Court shuts down resale of digital music files

/ Intellectual Property

Judge Richard J. Sullivan of the Southern District of New York held that owners of digital music have no right to sell that music to others. Capitol Records, LLC v. ReDigi Inc., 2013 WL 1286134 (S.D.N.Y. 2013). The case involved a company named ReDigi that created a software program that allowed legally-owned digital music files to be transferred by sale from one owner to a buyer in a manner that insured that the file was not retained on the original computer. The service also only allowed this to happen one file or album at a time so that it would not become a general means of selling the same song to multiple buyers. The service was limited to files purchased on iTunes or from another ReDigi user. The goal was to create a market for used digital music files. The court found that the service resulted in a reproduction of the original file …

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Second Circuit upholds “hot news” doctrine

/ Copyright, Intellectual Property

A recent case replays the conflict in the famous case of INS v. AP (International News Service v. Associated Press), 248 U.S. 215 (1918), which held that a news organization could stop a rival from selling news it had gathered for a short period when the news was still hot. In effect, the doctrine created a property right against a competitor’s use of the information for commercial purposes during the initial sales period. The Second Circuit reaffirmed that doctrine in the case of Barclays Capital Inc. v. Theflyonthewall.com, 2011 WL 2437554 (2d Cir. 2011), while simultaneously clarifying that noncompetitors were perfectly free to transmit the information without limit once it had been made public. The court held that investment banks could not stop a financial Web site from publishing on the Internet the research conclusions of the banks’s analysts once they were released to the public. At the same time, the banks …

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