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'Buy/Burn/Return' May Violate Copyright Law

By Geoffrey Hull

“Buy It, Burn It, Return It” is the policy recently adopted by a record chain in New Jersey. A radio ad for another retail store states: “You find it, you buy it, you burn it. What, I mean, not really burn it. You know. Put it in your iPod or MP3. And then sell it back. That's right: we'll buy your CDs back.” The retailer can then sell the recording as used, over and over again, buying it back for less than the selling price and profiting perhaps even more than by selling it only one time.

The problem with these “new” record-retail tactics is that they clearly violate the rights of sound-recording and musical-composition copyright owners to control the rental distribution of their works. Although not originally part of the Copyright Revision Act of 1976, Congress passed the Record Rental Amendment of 1984 at the urging of the recording industry, which viewed the combination of a growing number of rental stores and the potentially unlimited number of high-quality copies made from rental CDs as a threat. (The original Record Rental legislation had a sunset clause for the law to expire in 1989. The Sunset Provision was extended 8 years in 1988 (P.L. No. 100-617, 102 Stat. 3194). The Record Rental clause became a permanent part of the Copright law when the sunset provision was eliminated entirely as part of the NAFTA Implementation Act in 1993 (P.L. No. 103-182 Sec. 332, 107 Stat. 2057.))

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