Throwing a promotional CD in the garbage is, apparently, unauthorized distribution
The RIAA is like a recurring villain in a saturday morning cartoon; they’re full of evil, but after a while it almost becomes endearing watching them try to destroy our lives.
Take this newest right-hook to the solar plexus: Universal Music Group believes that throwing out a promotional CD is unauthorized distribution. This is direct disregard for the right-of-first-sale, which is a law that allows you, as an owner of copyrighted material, to sell it to other people and not have to pay the original owner. If you did, nobody would have garage sales and ebay wouldn’t exist.
Now, some people are going to take this out of context and assume that “promotional” discs mean “discs.” They don’t. Most music buyers never see a promotional disc. They’re largely given to radio stations, cd reviewers (I have a pretty respectable stack), and to people who give CDs away in contests and other promotions, thereby making them “promotional.” They’re not really meant to be shared, given away (by people other than those “giving them away”), or resold. Now, that’s of course the ideal world where the RIAA and the major music company’s live. Go to any used CD store and you’ll come across plenty of them. You can buy them, and you can listen to them, and this is legal.
What Universal is claiming is that because they own the copyright to these promotional discs (because they didn’t sell them to you), that by giving away, selling, or sharing these discs, you are doing so with music that doesn’t actually belong to you (because they still hold the copyright).
So, while the basic rules the RIAA set down on what you can do with a CD you actually pay for seem awfully stingy (you can’t, according to them, play CDs loudly from your car, transfer them to an mp3 player, or loan them to friends), the number of things you can do with a promotional CD is limiting them to use in a portable CD player (I wonder if my Panasonic 15-second no-skip player still works?) and keeping your coffee table coffee-strain free.
