In what could become a landmark court decision, New York district court Judge William Pauley has ruled that music locker service MP3Tunes does indeed qualify as a Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA) “safe haven,” thwarting attacks by music labels against the service. In their reporting, Ars Technica says that the ruling could bolster the arguments of other music locker services like Google and Amazon that their activities are legal, pending an inevitable appeal.
For those unaware, music lockers are online services that allow users to upload their digital music to remote servers and then stream that music from a computer or mobile device. MP3Tunes, the brainchild of Michael Robertson, gives users this uploading and streaming ability, but also a service called sideload.com to search for tracks already available online and transfer them into the users’ lockers.
In their suit, lead plaintiff EMI maintained that streaming user-uploaded tracks without a license from the music’s copyright owner is illegal. Furthermore, they claimed the sideload.com service gave users access to music they had not paid for, thus perpetuating piracy. The suit also attacked MP3Tunes’ use of a process called “deduplification” where instead of hosting thousands of copies of a song, such as Richard Harris’ MacArthur’s Park, the service hosts one copy and streams it to multiple users.
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