When is it no longer the property of the creator?
It reminds me of how books which aren’t sold have their covers returned to the publisher…which is why they carry the disclaimer: “If this book is sold to you without a cover, it is being illegally sold.” But what happens if the book cover is sent back, the book thrown into the recycling bin by the bookseller, then the book is salvaged by an entrepreneurial individual who resells it? It is obviously illegal for the original bookseller to both return the cover of the book and sell the actual book, but if it becomes one man’s trash and another’s treasure, is the latter breaking the law?
Let’s take this out of the heated context of copyright and look at it in terms of reselling goods.
If I discard a piece of lumber (for argument’s sake, let’s say I place it in a bin marked “unwanted crap”) and someone comes along and takes that discarded lumber and resells it, are they breaking any laws? Not that I know of. Should they be? I don’t think so.
Let’s say I sell lumber for a living, and decide to throw some lumber into a bin marked “unwanted crap”. If someone comes along, takes that discarded lumber and resells it, suddenly the situation becomes trickier. Because, in this imaginary world, I earn my income from the selling of lumber, I suddenly feel that I have lost potential income because the lumber which was once mine (but which I had discarded) has been sold by someone else. However, as a logical person, I would come to the conclusion that I have no right to the money made by that person because it was my choice to dispose that lumber into a bin marked “unwanted crap”. It was a bad business decision on my part, and the salvager was a much superior entrepreneur than I.
But, then, what happens when I’m not selling merely lumber, but poems etched in the lumber? The content of the poems are mine (assuming I’m not silly enough to infringe upon someone else’s copyright), but that copy of it no longer is mine when I have disposed of the lumber. Although I would still retain the moral rights to the poems on the lumber, I would not reasonably expect to still own the physical pieces of lumber. But what happens when that lumber is not sold merely as lumber, but as lumber with those particular poems etched into the lumber? Personally, I don’t think it’s reasonable to claim that someone doesn’t have the right to resell the lumber if I have discharged them from my inventory.
So, in summary, I think that BMG made a bad business decision and is trying to compensate by waving the Copyright Act at someone who is smarter than them.
Tags: bmg, copyright, law suits, mail, patry
