Let’s pretend we are deeply naive for a second: when you buy a CD, are you buying the music it contains? Or an aesthetically value-added material object that enables you to access the music? i-Tunes (and other online digital music outlets) would prefer us to believe the former, and the price differential between ludicrously expensive CDs and digital music would appear to bear them out. So, if the one-off “purchase” of a digitally-encoded track is in some way analagous to the purchase of a CD, then surely the purchaser has the right to subsequently transfer ownership, right? However counter-intuitive (and possibly silly) it might seem, 90% Crud has decided to test this twisted logic out by offering an m4p bought through i-Tunes for auction on ebay. It will cause a stir (well, here I am blogging it) and probably is an interesting, if unsophisticated, test of the legal limits of DRM, but will probably only help the lumbering carcass of the record industry to refine the purchase model – they will never ever let go of the idea that music is a thing that can be owned, bought, and licensed, when of course it isn’t a “thing” at all, but an experience.

As an aside, the alternative to the “purchase” model of course is the “pay per listen” one – far more creepy.

[update 05/09/03]: As a commenter to this post pointed out (see below), I need to account for the special nature of the i-tunes DRM system, which includes a swag of copy-protection measures, therefore making George’s experiment a bit less silly (the file cannot be infinitely reproduced and distributed, so the analogy to a CD purchase is not so far-fetched). Mac-Rumours has a good summary of the i-tunes model (although I admit it is possibly a little out of date–I’ll find a fresher version when I have time).