> "I'll just do X' instead of X and then everything is legal!"

Except... this is exactly what has happened.

It did? When did a court rule that a slight change in Zevida's practice would make it legal?

Lots of people are trying/hoping to change the First Sale Doctrine into something that can destroy copyright. That simply isn't going to happen. If some court someone rules that I can own a virtual copy of "The Avengers" and trade it around with my "friends" on the Internet, Congress will recognize that as a bug and modify the law.

Isn't this exactly how ReDigi operates? Is it different if the first sale is to a consumer rather than a company?

My reading was that ReDigi facilitates the "sale" of a song form one user to another by switching a DRM bit. Couldn't Zevida have done the same thing? Transfer ownership of the file to the user before pressing play on the dvd player?

It's not "exactly" how ReDigi operates, since there is a distinction that matters about where the "performance" happens. (And that distinction matters because Cablevision, which is what allows you to offer the home-DVR as a cloud-DVR, also said that the cloud-DVR was okay because of the fact that there was a copy for each customer.) EDIT I'm not so sure about that distinction now, but there are other differences, like Zevida actually having physical media.

Nor has ReDigi been found to be legal, unless the article failed to mention the resolution of the legal action against it.

I was talking about the companies mentioned in the original article which have stood up to judicial scrutiny despite having ridiculous setups that exist solely to circumvent prosecution. Judges clearly don't mind that.

> Congress will recognize that as a bug and modify the law.

Why are you so sure of that?

I consider it fairly obvious what Congress would do if ever became legal that one person with one copy of a movie or song can legally and instantly share it with millions of his "friends" online. The same way I consider it fairly obvious what Congress would do if it somehow became legal to manufacture your own dollar bills.

Some people would say it's because of "Big Hollywood" or "the mafIAA" or whatever, but regardless of the spin, Congress would still act.

But Congress obviously isn't doing anything about filling a data center with thousands of antennas and temporarily assigning them to individual customers in order to circumvent public performance restrictions.

At least in this case, talking about what decisions will "obviously" be made beforehand seems unwise.

Well you neglected to mention the aspect of it being a large number of shares in your last post. Congress doesn't know who my friends are and I should be able to loan out a movie to a handful of people over time if I want to.

>Congress will recognize that as a bug and modify the law //

It's not a bug.