I don’t have anything particularly profound to say on this one, except that the process of pushing on every possible edge of copyright to their advantage has led the record companies
into a kind of mania. From the EFF:

In a brief filed in federal court yesterday, Universal Music Group (UMG) states that, when it comes to the millions of promotional CDs (”promo CDs”) that it has sent out to music reviewers, radio stations, DJs, and other music industry insiders, throwing them away is “an unauthorized distribution” that violates copyright law. Yes, you read that right — if you’ve ever received a promo CD from UMG, and you don’t still have it, UMG thinks you’re a pirate.

The EFF is, of course, picking up one comment in a brief that is a little more subtle. UMG is suing Troy Augusto for selling the promotional CDs he received from them over eBay.  Augusto claims this is protected under the first sale doctrine, the same rule that lets you sell books to a used bookstore. UMG doesn’t like this. But in the process, they have to follow their tortured logic to its own conclusion:

Augusto testified that “a common way to dispose of them” is to give unsold promotional CD away, or he may throw them away. Both are unauthorized distributions. (from the UMG brief [PDF])

This is the kind of crazy that makes the whole RIAA effort just seem untethered to most people, when they get a glimpse. But what I find more curious is that, among a couple of different claims, UMG is arguing that first sale doesn’t apply here because the promotional CDs weren’t sold. As such, and because they are labelled as a “promotional copy,” Augusto shouldn’t have the right to re-sell them. Unfortunately, this is exactly counter to the argument the music and movie industries had to make when they pushed the NET Act through, and worked to criminalize peer-to-peer downloading: even though no money changes hands when someone trades software or music, the industry considers it a commercial act because it replaced a sale.

There is a logic in our legal system, that the process should be an adjudicated one: the judge decides, and as such, the parties involved can more or less try anything. A trial lawyer is not responsible for deciding if their client actually murdered someone, in fact they are obligated to give them the best defense regardless. In these kinds of copyright suits, except if the court finds a plaintiff to be wasting the courts time or absuing the law itself, the logic suggests that they can throw any argument against the wall to see if it sticks. But its troubling to me that this logic seems to permit stakeholders like UMG to plainly disregard any concern for what’s reasonable, what’s workable, what’s not that big a deal, what might be progressive, what’s tradition, what’s necessary, and instead just push their interests into every conceivable corner of copyright law, and see what these fishing expeditions turn up. At what point are we even asked to think as citizens, as part of society, as having collective responsibility, rather than self-interested individuals within it?

OK, so I went the profound direction. (Well, you can be the judge as to whether I actually got there.)