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As digital content begins to play a bigger role in our society we have to begin to try to understand it more and that includes in what ways do we actually own our digital goods. When you make a digital purchase your not actually buying something physical.

It’s kind of strange to think about, but what we’re really doing is buying the rights to use the said digital goods. Some people have started to look at this and wondered that if we own specific rights to use something then we should be able to sell those rights to others and we would then be effectively forfeiting our own rights to use the content.

Sounds pretty straight forward right? I give my rights that I bought to you at a discounted price. Well, as always, there is going to be a huge debate on whether this kind of stuff is actually legal or not and considering this is all brand new, we’re going to have to work that out in court.

This is exactly what has just happened as a federal judge in a case involving Capitol Records v. ReDigi, has just ruled that attempting to resell digital goods is illegal.

The general idea keeping this kind of activity alive was based on the first-sale doctrine, which allows someone who has legally purchased copyrighted material to resell it. This sounds like it should apply to digital content as well but the judge decided that even though Redigi makes users confirm that they have no existing copies and that the uploader will no longer have access to the files after the transaction is made, they still make copies despite ReDigi’s efforts.

This presents a clear challenge for companies like Apple who have plans to offer up a type of “used digital content” system. This also makes it less appealing to move to an all digital platform as used movie, music, and gaming stores will become obsolete and there will be no similar alternative.