ReDigi

» see redigi.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

ReDigi asked a question that only makes sense if you bought your music. You own the record, you can sell the record. You own the file and the law says you own a license and a copy, and a copy cannot be handed to somebody else without being copied. I was pulling mp3s off internet cafe machines in Turkey between 2002 and 2005, so the resale question never came up for me or for anyone I knew, because you cannot resell something you never bought. ReDigi was a US argument about a US purchase history, and it went all the way up.

John Ossenmacher launched the public beta in October 2011. The idea came from his daughter, who wanted an online drop box for unwanted digital media, and the company he built around it hired lawyers alongside engineers because the legal design was the product. ReDigi would only accept a file it could verify had been legally purchased from iTunes or from ReDigi itself. A file ripped from a CD was refused and so was anything downloaded from elsewhere. What remained was a marketplace where you could sell a used song for less than iTunes charged, with a cut of each resale going back to the artist.

Capitol Records sued in January 2012, three months in, asking 150,000 dollars per track. Judge Richard Sullivan granted summary judgment for Capitol in March 2013 and found that ReDigi had infringed its copyrights. The company filed for Chapter 11 in August 2016 with the appeal still pending. The Second Circuit ruled against it on 12 December 2018, the Supreme Court declined the case on 24 June 2019, and a 3.5 million dollar judgment was left standing.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the atomic transaction ~

The engineering is the reason the case is still taught. ReDigi's software uploaded a purchased file to its cloud packet by packet, deleting each packet from the seller's machine as it went, so that at no moment did two complete copies exist. Synced devices were scrubbed too. When a buyer took it, ownership changed hands and the seller lost access. The company called this the atomic transaction and held patents on it.

There was also a verification engine that scanned your library and worked out which files were eligible, and a creator syndication scheme that paid rights holders a percentage of every resale, sometimes more than the first sale had earned them. None of this was built by people trying to get away with something. It was built by people who thought the first-sale doctrine ought to survive the move from plastic to files, and who assumed a court would agree if the engineering was honest enough.

~ what the courts said ~

Sullivan's 2013 opinion turned on the word phonorecord. The first-sale right lets you dispose of a particular copy you own; it does not let you manufacture a new one. ReDigi argued that no new copy existed at the end of the process because the old one had been destroyed in transit. The court held that a new phonorecord had come into being on ReDigi's server, and that destroying the original did not undo the reproduction.

The Second Circuit agreed in December 2018, in an opinion that went out of its way to say Congress rather than the judiciary should be the one to extend first sale into the digital sphere if anyone was going to. That line is why the ruling mattered beyond music. A secondhand ebook market and a resale market for game licenses run into exactly the same wall, and nobody has taken it back to Congress since.

~ the last address ~

ReDigi's site was offline by December 2020 and the company never came back out of Chapter 11 as anything the public could use. The judgment stood, and the phrase first-sale doctrine went back to meaning secondhand bookstores.

Load redigi.com today and you are bounced to a lead-generation host, with an Indonesian slot-machine page serving under the name. A company that spent seven years arguing in federal court that a digital file could have a legitimate secondhand owner ended up as a domain selling slots.

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