Judgment from Europe’s Court of Justice in the UsedSoft case earlier this week found that a licensor’s rights to a program cease to apply following its first sale. The case concerned the unequal sales rules between content contained on CDRoms and downloads.

Shake up

According to expert lawyers, the ruling will shake-up the current system, where downloaded content is merely licensed to an individual user, allowing only that individual to access it and forbidding any future sales of the program.  Currently, any sharing of downloaded files constitutes copyright infringement.
The ruling brings downloaded media and books into line with their physical counterparts. In future, just as second-hand books can be resold, e-books can also be legally transferred or sold to new owners, provided the previous owner deletes his copy.

Developing market

The court concluded that it should be possible to sell used media ‘regardless of whether the sale relates to a tangible or an intangible copy of the program’.
Robin Fry, a copyright expert at London-based law firm DAC Beachcroft forecast the ruling will have implications for a ‘new legal market in used content’, envisaging on-line marketplaces for the transfer of digital files similar to those currently existing for physical books, CDs and DVDs.