Bopaboo

Bopaboo plans to let people sell used MP3s:

[Bopaboo...] – still in private beta – now allows you to keep the music files after someone else has purchased them, although you can sell each song only once. First, the service's spider figures out what music you have on your computer, and uploads the songs into an account. From there, you can sell your collection to the Bopaboo community at large, at prices determined by a demand-based algorithm, generally lower than what the same music costs on Amazon or iTunes.

Given that the music industry's preferred strategy is to try to get laws passed that force ISPs to monitor their users' internet traffic for unlicensed content, or at the very least to stigmatise any transmission of media files over the internet that doesn't involve buying from a reputable online store, I'd be astonished to see the major labels greet a scheme like this with any great enthusiasm.

In any case, I'm not sure I'd trust the company to keep the data collected by the service's spider about the contents of my hard disk to itself. I'm not suggesting that Bopaboo are intentionally acting as a data collection service for the music industry, but it's easy to envisage a scenario where Bopaboo – whether as a consequence of doing really well, or of failing to make a go of their original business plan – ended up wholly or partly owned by a conglomerate with media interests¹ and all that lovely data about the contents of users' hard disks, tied to details of their user account² being combed for unlicensed files, false positives and all. Then the lawyers' letters start arriving, offering you the choice between paying compensation and going to court, where you can spend even larger sums on lawyers…

Or am I just being paranoid?³

[Via The Browser]

1. Think Last.fm starting out as an independent company and ending up owned by CBS. ↩
2. Including bank or credit card details that can be linked to a real person. ↩
3. Can you be too paranoid about the music industry? ↩