The MP3tunes business was legal, Google and Amazon exhaled.

Over the ocean, where the case law still operates, an event worthy of being recorded in the annals took place on Monday: a federal judge interceded for the MP3tunes.com cloud music service. A court ruling states that companies and independent developers can create services that allow visitors to listen to songs from the cloud storage.

This case, in which EMI (Usher, Jay-Z and Lady Antebellum) acted as the prosecutor, was watched by the entire industry, especially two Internet companies: Amazon and Google, which recently launched similar services. Next on the list is Apple, which will introduce its music cloud (with the blessing of record labels) in September.

Judge William Pouley III (William Pauley III) noted that MP3tunes is protected by DMCA law: “If accidentally downloading material that violates the law is sufficient for criminal prosecution, even search services like Google and Yahoo! will remain without DMCA protection, the goal of which is to support innovation and growth of Internet services. Thus his authority will be undermined. "
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He added that: “the MP3tunes content storage system uses special software to play previously saved content to users. This type of system is protected by DMCA. ” Exactly the same wording allowed YouTube to flourish a little earlier (vs. Viacom), which was also opposed by the owners of labels and copyrights.

Yesterday's decision, although it concerned only one service, which allows listening to previously downloaded music on any device, showed a general attitude to such initiatives - that is, to the storage of media, and the rest, of content that can be accessed from anywhere.

The feature of MP3tunes is that instead of downloading specifically your song (from your disc), it checks the shared library for copies and finding one - just adds it to your storage without downloading another version of the file. No matter how many users have the same song in their library, MP3tunes stores only 1 copy of the file, giving everyone access to it.

Dropbox is another company that gives everyone the opportunity to keep their stuff on the network, has never sued record companies, but uses the same method of storing files as MP3tunes music. If the Dropbox user loads a file of a certain type (text, media, audio) into the service folder, he automatically checks the checksums and, finding a match, instantly “adds” the file that is somewhere in the depths of the network.

This practice is not perfect, because still allows copyright fighters to judge any person for storing non-licensed content on the network and providing public access to it. But it seems that in the New World such issues are now being treated with great attention.

via Wired ( 1 , 2 )