I just read this:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-19842851

It seems that more people are trying to push the option of digital resales.

It's an interesting idea, but the media lobby in the US is absurdly influential, so ReDigi have everything working against them.

I'm not sure how that could work other than DRM. I generally buy things based on recommendations and have yet to find an album that I regret having bought. I think The Marshall Mathers LP was the only one that I regret buying, and that has to do with some of the lewed and pointless sketches that were recorded for the disc.

Personally, I'd rather take the risk and not have DRM on the discs that I do like. But, I can understand why people would feel otherwise.

Think we had a thread about this a while ago (smegged if I know where it is, though), and I'll say here what I said there: something like this was bound to happen eventually.

So long as people think they are buying digital goods (and given the language used on such websites (including this one) who can blame them?), they will believe they own that digital good, and can do as they always did, namely lend it friends or resell it or whatever.

Going to be interesting to see what happens.

That thread was about computer games, but it's basically the same deal. With a physical book, it's easy to know that the rights have been transferred, but with digital it's very hard to do.

Now, with systems like Steam it ought to be possible to resell and trade used games. But DRM free, is somewhat harder to get working. And ultimately, if you're not doing the trading via the original shop that sold the game, then it's not likely to work.

One of the reasons why ReDigi started up was because of a somewhat recent court case ruling that the digital files a music label was selling were classified as phonorecords. This way they could pay less royalties to artists involved with the class action lawsuit. But now when it comes to the customer, EMI is claiming that what the customer purchases is a nontransferable license, which if it had been a license in the other court case, Universal would have owed much more money to the artists.

So it's a case of cognitive dissonance in the music industry, where what they sell is a phonorecord but what I purchase isn't. This is especially funny now that a takeover of EMI by Universal has been approved a couple of weeks ago. So which way are they going to keep arguing? Both?

ReDigi only works with iTunes and their own sales anyway, so anything I have won't be eligible. It seems like it only works with DRM'd music. iTunes sells files without DRM nowadays but they must still put something in them that ReDigi is able to verify with 100% accuracy.