What Is a Second-Hand Download, Anyway?

Resale used to be the natural start and end point of a track’s lifecycle. You’d buy a CD (or a cassette tape, or a record), listen to it to your heart’s content and then, when it just wasn’t cool any more and you fancied supplementing your pocket money a little, you’d sell it on to someone who wasn’t quite so hip.

But the story’s different with digital downloads, which you won't find in the pre-loved section of your local record store, and which don’t fit into an envelope for easy packaging and shipping. While you probably see a single bought from iTunes as essentially the same as a single bought on CD, just without the physical format, record labels are trying to get them treated differently when it comes to selling on your “used” files.

TorrentFreak has brought to attention the responses of the record label industry and other interested parties to an EU public consultation on copyright laws, where the issue of resale was one point of contention. You can download everyone’s responses here—it’s a lot of text in various languages and document formats; the question on reselling is number 14 in the survey, “What would be the consequences of providing a legal framework enabling the resale of previously purchased digital content?”

It's worth noting that at the moment that's all rather speculative. For one thing, consumers often don't actually 'own' digital content under current rules, they just 'license' it. Any system to allow reselling on a widespread scale would no doubt require a lot of small print.

And the recording industry seems set against stopping that from happening. Industry group IFPI (the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry) argues that allowing resales of previously purchased digital content would have “very harmful consequences for the entire music market.”

Their argument boils down to the fact that digital goods are very different to physical goods in some key areas: they don’t wear out or deteriorate in quality over time, and you have to sell the original, not a copy. The first point seems rather tenuous in isolation—after all, there’s nothing stopping you fro, keeping a record in mint condition for resale—but the second is worth more consideration.

It’s the same situation Motherboard’s Brian Merchant pointed out in regard to the idea of “used e-books”; who would pay for an original if they can buy a copy that’s exactly the same, but cheaper?

In this case there’s the additional problem that, if you could sell something without losing ownership of it yourself, then only one person would ever have to buy an original. When you sell a physical record, you say goodbye to it as soon as it leaves your hands and hits the post box, but it’s harder to verify that the resale of a digital product involves an actual transfer of goods. And record companies don’t like that idea.

In Austria, 20th Century Fox (Centfox-Film) pointed out that, “To be consistent, original users would presumably need to destroy/delete it or make it unusable otherwise,” but that this would be impossible to enforce. “The result would then be an approval of mass reproductions and of the free circulation of digital works,” they argued. Sony submitted the same response, verbatim.

Not everyone shares the view that reselling digital content would automatically be bad. The UK government, for instance, responded, “As regards the resale of copies, the UK notes that traditional secondary markets for goods can encourage both initial purchase and adoption of technologies, and the prospect of sale on the secondary market may be factored in to an initial decision to buy and to market prices.”

But they too add the caveat that, for a secondhand marketplace to work, the “forward and delete issue” would have to be solved. “Because of this issue, a sophisticated analysis of the overall economic implications of digital resale markets is required, and this would be an area suitable for further research,” they said.

The recording industry seems loathe to change, and IPFI goes so far as to accuse to European Commission of rushing to change copyright legislation, “in spite of the fact that no concrete evidence has been found that problems exist in the music sector.” But the fact is that the way we buy, sell, and consume music is changing, and it’s probably a positive sign that the EU is looking to consider legislation before problems arise.

As TorrentFreak points out, the Commission now has the laborious task of poring over and parsing through all of those responses before we hear more on the issue. But as oxymoronic as it sounds, the future of music might just be second-hand downloads.