![]() ![]() The court then notes that it doesn’t even need to get into the First Sale issues, but then suggests Redbox would have difficulty winning on a pure first sale argument, mainly because of the ReDigi decision that said you can’t sell “used” MP3s. Public policy enshrined in the Copyright Act, and constitutesīecause of this, the court finds that Disney has little chance of prevailing on its contributory copyright infringement claims and denies the injunction request. Transfers of physical copies directly implicates and conflicts with This improper leveraging ofĭisney?s copyright in the digital content to restrict secondary Statutorily-guaranteed right to distribute their physical copies of The scope of the license agreement unless they forego their Movie content, for which they have already paid, without exceeding And, (somewhat surprisingly), in the process of denying Disney’s demand for a preliminary injunction, the court agrees that Disney is engaged in copyright misuse because it is using its copyright in the movies to restrict what happens to purchases.Ĭombo Pack purchasers cannot access digital The basic argument was that Disney was over-claiming what copyright allowed it to exclude in order to stamp out competition. ![]() Disney’s response to that was that First Sale does not apply to the download code because it’s not the copyright-covered work.īut Redbox also hit back with a separate punch against Disney, arguing that it was engaged in copyright misuse, a concept we’ve discussed in the past, but that rarely shows up in cases these days (even though we’ve argued it should be used more often). Redbox hit back by arguing that the First Sale doctrine protected it (as it did with the physical rentals) and that it is free to use the codes in this manner as the legal purchaser. Disney argued that this was contributory copyright infringement, even though the code pointed to a legitimate/authorized version of the movie and was legitimately purchased. They weren’t just copying the code and letting anyone use it - it was still a one-to-one limitation with the purchase in that they would buy the DVD with a paper code on it, and then stuff that paper code into their kiosk delivery pods. So, Redbox would buy the Disney “Combo Packs” that offered the DVD and a download code, and the would offer the paper codes in kiosks to let renters watch the movie online. Though it took them basically forever, Hollywood studios have finally realized that offering online access with the purchase of movies is a good idea, but they only want the end consumer who is buying a DVD to get access to them. About a decade ago, Hollywood fought vigorously against Redbox, but the company survived (though being taken over by a private equity firm in 2016), relying heavily on first sale rights, enabling it to legally purchase DVDs and then rent them out.īack in December, however, Disney sued Redbox over taking its business to the next level and including download codes that could be purchased at a Redbox kiosk. It’s managed to stay alive despite the traditional DVD rental business disappearing most everywhere else. Redbox, as you probably know, has kiosks where you can rent DVDs relatively cheaply. This is in a case that Disney brought - and it appears to be backfiring badly. For the past few months I’ve been meaning to write about Disney’s silly lawsuit against Redbox, but other stuff kept coming up, and now a judge has ruled against Disney and said that Disney appears to be engaged in copyright misuse. Thu, Feb 22nd 2018 10:42am - Mike Masnick ![]()
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