This does bring up an interesting issue, which may take a case such as Willis is bringing to settle.
When you buy a stone-aged book, you are not just buying the physical object; you are buying the permanent right to use the intellectual property contained in that object. You can sell the book to someone else, or leave it as part of your estate when you die. As long as the book physically remains, whomever has possession of it has possession of the right to use the intellectual property therein. Possession of the book does not, however, give anyone the right to copy material out of it and give that material to someone else. That is the point at which a violation occurs of the intellectual property rights of the holder of the copyright on that book.
The same would be true of a phonograph record, a CD, a DVD, a BluRay disk, or any other physical object, that one would legally acquire, containing intellectual property.
The right to use the intellectual property is tied to a physical object, which may be sold, traded, or in any other way passed from one person to another.
Digitally-stored media, not tied to a physical object, might be a completely different matter.
Do current systems, such as iTunes, allow someone who has bought a digital medium to transfer his ownership thereof to someone else? To be completely analogous to books, CDs, and so on, there would have to be a way if, having bought a piece of music on iTunes; I decided I no longer wanted it, I could transfer it to someone else, such that that person now has it, and I do not.
Perhaps it's not quite analogous. Perhaps the “right” that one buys through a service like iTunes is nontransferable; permanently tied to the person who bought it, and expiring when that person dies. I guess it'll take court cases like this to sort it out.
This wouldn't be specific to iTunes and Apple. Google has a similar system through its Google Play store, and Amazon also has a similar system as well. I expect that once the principles are established for any one of these, they will be equally applicable to all of them.
