Is current legislation equipped to handle such a change in the way music distribution occurs?
Copyright law protects the music industry’s most important assets – musical compositions and sound recordings. The copyright owners in musical compositions, generally music publishers, cannot control the availability of their song catalog. Under copyright law, once compositions are publicly released in a phonorecord, composition copyright owners are required to grant licenses to those musical compositions for use in all other sound recordings. The First Sale Doctrine has traditionally been applied to the disposition of a material object containing copyrighted material thereon, such as a sound recording fixed onto a compact disc. As will be discussed below, in the online landscape lawful purchasers would not be transferring the material object. Rather, purchasers would be transferring music files (i.e., copyrighted material) from one material object to another. This ability to transfer arguably falls outside the scope of the policy against restraints on the alienation of tangible proper
