Amazon, Dropbox, Google and You Win in Cloud-Music Copyright Decision

The court gives a broad reading to the DMCA safe-harbor provisions in the context of a music-locker service. In this sense, it does for music storage what the Viacom/YouTube case did for video storage - it severely limits the duty of a host to police its site for infringing content of users based on loosey-goosey standards or based on fuzzily-worded takedown notices (e.g., "remove all songs by . . .").

Another way of putting this: if the host does not knowingly countenance infringing acts, and if it diligently complies with takedown notices identifying specific items that are infringing, it is immunized from liability for infringement, whether direct, contributory, or vicarious. In other words, Congress passed the DMCA to facilitate the growth and maintenance of robust internet services and the courts will give the law its proper force notwithstanding the efforts of content providers to try to finagle new revenues through aggressive lawsuits attacking the services. In this sense, the opinion is a well-reasoned extension of Viacom, which was decided last year in favor of Google and YouTube on a grant of summary judgment (my comments on Viacom: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1456757). Here too the decision was on summary judgment (what summary judgment means: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1457388).

At the same time, MP3tunes got nailed here for failing to follow up properly on the takedown notices in the sense of taking steps to remove properly identified infringing materials from the lockers of users. On this point, the court granted judgment for EMI based on affidavits alone and held MP3tunes liable even without a trial. Again, a big part of the court's reasoning was devoted to this point.

On a final note, the copyright law is complex on the issue of de-duplicating storage (a previous comment of mine on this is here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2535137; for some commentary by EFF, see here: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2011/05/current-music-locker-s...). Common sense, of course, dictates that a user who has already bought a piece of music, who uploads it into a service, and who enjoys listening to it through that service is doing nothing more than getting the benefit of something legally purchased. The problem is that law often fails to keep up with changing technology. Thus, well-established copyright principles (decided years ago in the offline world) say that one engages in a "public performance" if he uses one copy of a copyrighted item to enable members of the public to view or listen to it serially (this is the so-called "master copy" reference mentioned in the decision). Of course, it is not really "one copy" if each user individually uploads his own copy and then replays it. But is it the user's own copy if it is de-duplicated? This decision says it is but this is by no means a foregone conclusion under the law and that is why Amazon and Google have taken the conservative route and have not used de-duplication. In fact, it is an area of great uncertainty. This decision, good as it is on the point, does not change that. This is a trial court decision that has no legally binding effect beyond its impact on the parties immediately before the court. It will be appealed and who knows what will happen at the next level? I would seriously doubt that major services like Google's will think themselves safe to de-duplicate their storage just yet.

All in all, a very good decision but very likely not the final word on these issues.

This just shows how plain stupid music labels are in the age of Internet. Seriously, store 50,000 copies of the same file? Insane.

Here's the actual decision: http://www.nysd.uscourts.gov/cases/show.php?db=special&i...

It looks like EMI prevailed on some claims, but not the claim that de-duplicated storage is itself a copyright violation.

> However, the ruling makes clear that if MP3tunes scanned a customer’s music collection and found “Stairway to Heaven” ripped from a CD with a slightly different file size, the company could not simply substitute a master copy. Instead, that customer would have to upload the file.

> While the latter case still seems non-sensical, the ruling still must come as a relief to Google, Amazon and Dropbox.

Come on, how is that non-sensical? It'd be dead simple to set the ID3 tags of any 4MB mp3 file to match the tags accepted for a given song. From what I read, and the legalspeak got pretty heavy so I may have missed it, there wasn't any discussion of audio fingerprinting or more advanced ways to determine two files are the same song.

Want an entire artist's discography? Use a 15KB app which spits out 100 junk MP3 files with the right ID3 tags and submit them to MP3Tunes. If we do what this author considers "sensical," you should get the real music back.

I hope this encourages Dropbox to venture further into streaming services. I store my entire music library in Dropbox, but I've never come across a feasible way to access that media on the go / from my mobile devices.

On the other hand, Cloud Drive nailed that use case perfectly, but getting my music into the system would require lots of tedious manual uploading.

Isn't this the very legal issue which cost MP3.com it's business years ago?

The details matter here, so far as the decision is that if they are bit-for-bit duplicates, there's no need to store more than one copy.

I was under the impression that the bit-for-bit duplicates weren't the only things Google et al had their sights on though, i.e., they were hoping to do something along the lines of iCloud. Was I mistaken?

In any case, it's a shame that it was necessary to go through the judicial hoopla to determine that it's okay to practice what's more commonly known as "compression".

Strange how they left iCloud out of the story completely. I hear that service is somewhat related and will be used by at least a few dozen people.