Interesting Experiment: Reselling a digital good

George Hotelling is attempt­ing an inter­est­ing exper­i­ment for the dig­i­tal age: reselling a song bought on the iTunes music store. The rea­son it is inter­est­ing is that he has checked the license agree­ment and it seems per­fectly OK for him to trans­fer a file to some­one else. This will be an inter­est­ing test of whether Apple actu­ally means what it says when it men­tions that songs in the iTunes Music Store are bought and not rented. They made a big deal about this when they first intro­duced the store so it will be fas­ci­nat­ing to see how they react to this sale.

Extend­ing beyond Apple, this def­i­nitely falls into the “Push­ing the Enve­lope” cat­e­gory as it is one of the first case of reselling a legally pur­chased dig­i­tal good and reselling it. It will be fas­ci­nat­ing to see what the reac­tion is going to be.