Judge denies EMI's bid to halt resale of digital music
ReDigi, a music marketplace for used digital tracks, will have its day in court. — EMI's The Capitol Records building in Hollywood. Capitol Records is the EMI label represented in EMI's copyright suit against ReDigi.
Context & Ripple Effects
EMI's Capitol Records label sued ReDigi, a marketplace for reselling used digital tracks, alleging copyright infringement — and sought a preliminary injunction to shut the service down before trial. The court refused, meaning ReDigi keeps operating while the case proceeds to a full hearing.
The ruling lands amid a stretch of mixed legal fortunes for EMI: barely a year earlier, the label and its peers were rejected by a high court in their appeal of the song-pricing lawsuit, and the company has spent years recalibrating its digital approach after earlier strategy missteps. A loss here would have been a clean win; instead, the question of whether consumers own the right to resell an MP3 now gets argued on the merits.
First-order effects
- ReDigi continues listing and brokering used digital tracks through the litigation, with no court-ordered shutdown in the interim.
- EMI must commit to a full merits fight over whether its licenses permit secondary-market sales, rather than ending the dispute with an injunction.
Second-order effects
- Other major labels now face a live precedent-in-progress: if ReDigi prevails, every digital download sale carries a potential resale right that erodes the assumption of one-buyer-per-license.
- A functioning used-MP3 market pressures new-track pricing at the margin, echoing the price-fixing allegations the labels have already fought in court.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, courts rather than licenses will define digital ownership — forcing rights holders to build resale terms into contracts or DRM instead of relying on the default that downloads are non-transferable.
- Secondary-market infrastructure for digital goods becomes a testable business category, with the ReDigi verdict serving as the gate other marketplaces wait on.
The trend: Courts are being pushed to decide whether the first-sale doctrine travels from physical media to digital files, with label lawsuits like EMI v. ReDigi setting the boundary case by case.