CRCS Lunch Seminar

Date: Wednesday, October 16, 2013
Time: 12:00pm – 1:30pm
Place: Maxwell Dworkin 119

Speaker: Larry Rudolph,  Founder, ReDigi Inc and MIT CSAIL Affiliate

Title:  First Sale Doctrine as it applies to digital goods

Abstract: In 1908, the US Supreme Court ruled on a case in which publisher Bobbs-Merrill,  inserted a notice in its books that any retail sale at a price under $1.00 would constitute an infringement of its copyright.  Macy's  disregarded the notice and sold the books at a lower price without Bobbs-Merrill's consent.   The Supreme Court held that the exclusive statutory right to "vend" applied only to the first sale of the copyrighted work.  Once Macy's purchased the books, Bobbs-Merrill's rights were exhausted.  Bobbs-Merrill could not control the secondary market.

Just over a hundred years later, the music publisher EMI, sued ReDigi, a marketplace for used digital goods, to prevent digital music tracks legally purchased and downloaded to be resold.  In particular, after you buy a song from iTunes, download it to your computer, EMI says you cannot resell that song, at least not if you use ReDigi 1.0 technology.

This talk will discuss the business model, the social implications, but most of all, the technology used by ReDigi.  The talk will try to interpret the 1976 copyright law through the eyes of a computer scientist and not a lawyer, especially as it relates to disembodied digital goods, such as music, ebooks, video games, and software that not "fixed in a material object."  As more and more physical objects become virtualized, these issues will continue to haunt computer scientists.

Short Bio:   Larry Rudolph is currently co-founder and CTO of ReDigi Inc.  Before founding ReDigi, Larry help launch the Mobile Virtualization Project (MVP) at VMWare, which is now knows as VMWare Horizon Mobile and is part of Android phones sold by Verizon.   Previously, Larry has been a researcher at the MIT CSAIL, Professor at Hebrew University, and on the faculty at CMU.  His lifelong research interests are high performance computing, systems, and architectures as well as low performance, pervasive computing.