Posted by Tom Phillips

Lots of people will, at some point, have carted a load of old, unwanted records to a charity shop or car boot sale. But what to do with all those used music files you no longer want, and are cluttering up your hard drive?

Well, one website claims to have the answer: it lets you sell your second-hand MP3s.

Yes, you read that right. A used MP3 website. And no, it doesn’t seem to be a joke. (If it is a hoax, it’s an weirdly elaborate one.)

Bopaboo.com (in addition to providing evidence that all the good domains names have been taken) say they want people to ’stop illegally sharing and start legally selling’ – although they appear to be defining ‘legal’ as ‘nobody has any idea if it’s legal or not’.

The logic behind it is that it’s legal to sell on a CD you’ve bought – so why can’t you do the same with a music file? In case you haven’t spotted it yet, the difference is that when you sell a CD, you don’t get to keep an identical copy of it for yourself. Which is probably a point that the record labels and their lawyers are making right now.

That’s unless, of course, Bopaboo have some special software that reaches onto your computer and deletes your files for you, in which case we can’t see many people flocking to use it. Grant a website the power to wipe your files? Ooooh, yeah, that sounds like an excellent idea.

The site’s in private beta for the time being; you have to request an invitation to sign up. If it ever launches to the public at large (which we’d bet one second-hand Menswear MP3 it never will) then you might see a new record set for time from launch to first lawsuit. Either that, or they’ll be billionaires within the year.

Categories: Entertainment
Tags: mp3