You thought they'd ignore it, didn'tcha? You figured that Apple would just pretend that last week's eBay auction of a song purchased from the iTunes Music Store never happened. (That's certainly what eBay's doing, at any rate.) Well, frankly, so do we; Apple usually doesn't address goofiness like that directly, and we're more than used to seeing the phrase "Apple was unavailable for comment" at the end of articles about such shenanigans. And yet this time, the company had an official take on the whole issue of "First Sale" as it pertains to all those ABBA songs you've been hoarding: according to CNET, as far as Apple's concerned, you do, indeed, "perhaps" have the right to resell the music you've purchased.

That's more significant than it may first sound, because what Apple's Peter Lowe is saying is that, yes, when you buy music from the iTMS, you're buying music from the iTMS. ("Perhaps," sure, but we'll take it.) You're not just paying for a license to listen to the downloaded data. As an area, it's all sort of grey and fuzzy and it's got little fiddly bits hanging off it at weird angles, but from Apple's perspective, you do in fact own that particular recording of that song, so according to the doctrine of "First Sale" (which is what allows you to sell a book or CD that you bought without having to get an okay from the copyright holder first), you're perfectly free to try to resell it if you like. The only thing is, you probably won't like.

What Pete "director of marketing for applications and services and boy this is a really long nickname oh wait it's actually my job title so never mind" Lowe actually told CNET was that "Apple's position is that it is impractical, though perhaps within someone's rights, to sell music purchased online." The thorny bit, of course, is the FreePlay digital rights management embedded into iTMS songs, which ties the purchaser to the downloaded tune so that it can't just be copied willy-nilly all over the planet. Since your purchased songs are linked to your Apple ID, in order to resell a song that the buyer could actually play, you'd also have to sell your account. And the problem with that is, of course, if you bought 100 songs and sell just one, if your Apple ID gets sold with that one, suddenly you've got no way to play the other 99. D'oh!

On top of that, since there are technical hurdles to jump on both the buying and selling ends of the transaction and the song is available hassle-free for 99 cents directly from the iTMS in the first place, the market for resold iTMS music should be next to nonexistent. So basically, what Apple is saying is that reselling your iTMS songs is kinda like being a flabby and unattractive man who rides a unicycle through areas of heavy pedestrian traffic while singing campfire songs topless: you can do it and it seems to be legal, but no one actually wants you to do it, so why go through the hassle? (No offense to the flabby, unattractive, unicycle-riding, Kumbaya-singing, topless-going contingent of our viewing audience, of course.)

That said, Apple is clearly misjudging the demand for used iTMS songs, since the one auctioned on eBay had risen to over $100,000 before eBay pulled the plug. We would gladly part with our Apple IDs for that kind of cash. Heck, at this point we'll sell 'em for eighty bucks and a bag of Baked Lays. Any takers?